Thursday, July 28, 2005 7:16 PM jhinkle

Change Windows XP's Explorer sort order

I had a VP ask me for this the other day. Windows XP does what equates to "true" sorting. It would sort 1, 6, 12, 24 in that order, rather than the classic 1, 12, 24, 6. The resgitry key below changes that sort order.



Windows Support Forums - Finally "fix" Windows Explorer file sorting in XP! (WXP-Pro):

"You can finally fix this feature for Windows XP SP1 or greater by creating the following registry key:


(For all users)
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\Explorer]
NoStrCmpLogical = DWORD: 1

(Per user)
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer]
NoStrCmpLogical = DWORD: 1
"

(Via WinGuides.)

Comments

# re: Change Windows XP's Explorer sort order

Sunday, August 07, 2005 3:22 AM by jhinkle

Am I glad to find this "fix". I thought I was going nuts.

I have over 90 gigabytes of records that I have maintained on seperate drives. I use a system of folders that use numerical years as their names: 1970, 1971 ...

There are some records that do not relate to a specific year but can be related to a span of years. To accomodate these records I created folders that had as their names the first three digis of the year ended with an 'x': 197x, 198x ...

Before I installed Windows XP, the folders would sort in the expected order with the years in numerical order with the 'x' folders following the last year of each decade: 1988, 1989, 198x ... 1998, 1999, 199x

But after installing Windows XP, the sort order changed. All the 'x' terminated folders were grouped together and listed at the 'front' of the file: 196x, 197x ... 1955, 1956 ...

Until I found your 'fix', I couldn't find anyone who understood what I was talking about. I even had my sanity questioned, though not seriously.

I see now what was happening. That by inserting an 'x' or any non numeric character at the end of the year, explorer saw the numeric value as less than that of the years with four numerals.

But it doesn't make sense to sort all records by numeric value, obviously.

In fact, there have been occasions when I wished I could select different sort orders where punctuation characters would come before numerals and letters. Or select ASCII order. I don't suppose you have a 'fix' for that?

What possessed Microsoft to make this change and not provide a simple way for users to choose whether they want it?

The only answer that comes to mind: arrogance.