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DADDY BOB'S COMPUTER Q & A
June 28, 2009
Q.
On a friends computer, when I right click on
a file the menu that is displayed lists
"Move to folder" and "Copy to folder". How
can I get these 2 choices on my computer?
A.
These are not options that are displayed on
the right click menu by default when Windows
is installed, so your friend must have made
a modification to his registry or downloaded
and ran a program that did. The "Copy to
Folder" and "Move to Folder" options weren’t
designed to be on the context menu. They
were only meant to be placed in Explorer’s
toolbar, but......
The Copy
To Folder and Move To Folder options found
in the Edit menu in Windows Explorer help
you move or copy a file or folder easily to
a different location. With a little registry
edit, this functionality can also be added
to the right-click menu in Windows XP,
Windows Vista and Windows 7.
The
Windows 95 and 98 Power Toys had an option
called "Send to X" that accomplished the
same thing, but this option was not included
in Windows XP's version of Power Toys for
good reasons. When installed on XP it
introduces a glaring undesirable
side-effect. The problem is that when
opening multiple files from Windows
Explorer, you’ll see the Copy To or the Move
To dialog continuously popping up
unnecessarily. This can drive you
nuts, so the option was not included in
Power Toys for XP.
There are
no Power Toys for Vista and probable will
not be any for Windows 7 either even though
many of the additions in previous Power Toys
are highly desirable. However, the ability
to add them is still there even if the
method to do so isn't provided in as nice a
format. Also, these items can be added to
Vista and Windows 7 without the undesirable
side effect that they could caused in XP.
To
manually add these two items to the right
click menu you need to add two new subkeys
to the registry. Here are the two new
subkeys to add. For the "Move to Folder"
option, add the subkey
{C2FBB631-2971-11D1-A18C-00C04FD75D13} to the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AllFileSystemObjects\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers
key. To add the "Copy to Folder" option, add
the subkey {C2FBB630-2971-11D1-A18C-00C04FD75D13} to
the same key. To remove these two items from
the right click menu, just delete these two subkeys.
I have
written a little program that will make
these registry additions for you. It also
allow you to reverse this action and remove
the items if you so desire. This program
will display a warning message alerting you
to the possible side effect, if install on
XP. However, since this can be easily
changed back, there is no harm it
experimenting with it on XP to see if the
benefits outweigh the side effects.
This
program called "CopyToMoveTo.exe" can be
downloaded from the download section of this
site, or by clicking
HERE.
If you copy or move files or folders
frequently, you will find these options come
in very handy and can make the process much
easier and faster. |
