FileBox Extender for Windows

Shanx — Thu, 03 May 2007 13:36:37 +0000

Very useful utility for the file opener/saver dialog boxes in Windows.

Here's a nifty little utility that allows you to set most often-used folders on your PC and access them quickly from a FILE OPEN dialogue box.

FileBox Extender

These little icons appear in all the File –> Open boxes in Windows. Which is very handy. Among the several customizations you can make to this oft-used file dialog box is the ability to automatically sort the file names by name, date, size, or type, and the ability to see the file names in Details or Thumbnails views. (Btw, the skin you see in that screenshot above is from Flyakiteosx).

How to Change FbX Button Images

You can tell a utility is well coded if you can customize it to your tastes. I have changed the icons that come with the tool as default (which are somewhat Win3.1-ish). This is simple. In the folder where you installed FileBox eXtender, there's a sub-folder named ICONS. Inside that are several standard format Windows icon files (with the extension .ICO). Copy a pair of these files into the main program folder, and then rename them to FAVORITE.ICO and RECENT.ICO. Now exit and restart FileBox eXtender. (In some cases you will have to reboot your machine—exiting and restarting the program may not be enough to effect the change). That's it. Your new icons should now appear.

Add Folder Size in Windows XP's Explorer

Shanx — Thu, 20 Feb 2003 07:05:16 +0000

Neat little tip to see size of your folders.

Want to see the size of your folders and not just files in your Windows XP Explorer listings?

If you are interested, Sequoia View is a very useful tool to do some nifty things with your folders. Other than that, this following note is now showing its age. If sorting and such is not necessary, a simple mouse-over your folders in Explorer will show you a tooltip with an approximate size of your directories. The menu option Tools --> Options --> View --> Show file size in folder tips should let you control the behavior of this tooltip.

Well it's probably a simple feature that the Windows team at Microsoft forgot to include, so Mark Dormer has a solution. Just download his tiny DLL file:

Download Mark Dormer's Folderview DLL

It's an EXE file. All you really have to do is:

Copy the file to your c:\windows\system32 folder.
Execute the following command in Start –> Run dialogue box and you're ready to roll:
regsvr32 c:\windows\system32\dirsize.dll
Now open Explorer in details view, you wont see the column yet. Right click on a heading in the right pane and select "Folder Size".

Couple of Caveats

Calculating folder size is a turtle on very large folders with lots of subfolders. There's no indexing built into this.
As much you and I would like, this tool doesn't do sorting of folders based on the folder size. You may want to give another utility a try, the Folder Shell Extension.

Couple of Tips

To apply this setting for all the folder, click Tools, Folder Options. In the View tab and click Apply to all folders.
To remove the feature, simply un–register the DLL later with the following command (ignore error messages if any) –
regsvr32 /u %Systemroot%\System32\Dirsize.dll

Hope this helps.