Windows XP Home Edition: The Missing Manual

Copying and Moving Folders and Files

Windows XP offers two different techniques for moving files and folders from one place to another: dragging them, and using the Copy and Paste commands.

Whichever method you choose, you must start by showing Windows which icons you want to copy or move—by highlighting them.

Highlighting Icons

To highlight (that is, select) one icon, just click it once. But you don’t have to move, copy, or delete one icon at a time; you can select a number of icons in the same folder or disk window. You may want to employ this technique, for example, when moving a bunch of documents from one folder to another, or copying them onto a backup disk en masse.

Tip

It’s easiest to work with multiple icons in Details view (Section 3.2.1.2), where every icon appears in a single column.

To highlight multiple files in preparation for moving, copying, or deleting, use one of these techniques:

To highlight all the icons

To select all the icons in a window, press Ctrl+A (the keyboard equivalent of the Edit→Select All command).

To highlight several icons

You can drag across file and folder names to highlight a group of consecutive icons. Start with your cursor above and to one side of the icons, then drag diagonally. As you drag, you create a temporary dotted-line rectangle. Any icon that falls within this rectangle darkens to indicate that it’s been selected.

Alternatively, click the first icon you want to highlight, and Shift-click the last file. All the files in between are automatically ...