What is Explorer.exe in windows?
Windows is most popular Operating System and more than 90% of Computer users use windows operating system. But most of them don't know how windows OS works and what are the various processes windows run to provide you an optimum experience. I am creating a series of posts in which I'll explain detailed information about each and every process that windows run in the background to provide the optimal user experience.
Windows use a special application to handle user interface (GUI- Graphical User Interface) Whenever user power on the computer he/she wait for the user-interface to load and most of the people think it is not possible to access the computer without it, but they are wrong. I'll talk about it later in another post "What is CMD in windows"(I'll link it whenever I write it in future) in this post we'll focus on Explorer.exe only.
Generally, whenever windows starts completely we see the normal Desktop like this
the first scen we see on our screen is desktop having some icons on the left side (or somewhere else on desktop based on user customization) include Recycle bin, This PC (Computer), users documents, etc and task bar which may have some pinned applications, start button, and notification area.
All this things you see on your screen are the part of GUI i.e. Graphical User Interface as you may know Graphics means visual property or something which can be seen on screen and user interface is how a user can interact with the computer. This GUI is managed by Explorer.exe.
Explorer do all types of tasks user does on the computer like accessing files, copying/moving/deleting/restoring(recycle bin) the data, launching applications, etc. The user interface of Explorer is different for different versions of windows. i.e windows XP has different GUI, vista/7 have aero powered gui and all this is managed by the explorer.
Quick access is default directory of explorer means whenever we run explorer.exe we are redirected to the Quick access location. Microsoft introduced a ribbon UI in explorer for windows 8 and above. The ribbon included some basic tools and tasks shortcuts which allows users to perform these operations more conveniently and probably without explorer.
Some Explorer tricks
- Open Run (Windows button + R) and type C:\windows\explorer.exe to start explorer manually. [This trick is useful if your PC is taking longer to start explorer or not loading it at all]
- Open task manager (ctrl+Shift+esc) select and right-click on explorer.exe and select restart.[This will help you whenever UI becomes unresponsive]
- Press Windows button + Tab to overview the running applications.
- Go to desktop and press print screen button then open paint and press ctrl+v and save it and set the image as desktop background. Then right-click on the desktop and under View deselect show desktop icons [The screenshot image will show desktop icons and it will look like real icons. using this trick you can fool someone]
- Double-Click on any of the tab available in the ribbon to expand/Collapse the ribbon permanently.
#advanceduser
@techsimplifier
