How To Change Windows Explorer’s Starting Location

By default, when you start Windows Explorer, it opens up to your Libraries. If you’d rather have it open to a different folder, changing this behaviour is very easy. Here’s how.

I don’t really use Libraries all that much, so it’s annoying to have Windows Explorer constantly sending me there. I’d rather Windows Explorer start up in my user folder, so I can access my Dropbox and other useful folders without having to go through Libraries. Luckily, this is easy to change:

1. Right-click on the Windows Explorer icon in your taskbar. Right click on “File Explorer” and choose Properties.
2. Under “Target”, change the path to the folder you want Windows Explorer to display by default. In my case, that’s F:\Users\Whitson\ for my user folder.

That’s it! However, some folders — like My Computer, for example — don’t have a specific “path”, as they’re something that’s part of the OS itself. In those cases, our friends at the How-To Geek note that you can use the GUID of the location to make it work. For example, if you wanted it to open My Computer, you would change the target to:

%SystemRoot%explorer.exe /E,::{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}
Google around to find the GUID of the special location you want to use, if necessary. If you use Win+E to open Explorer, this trick won’t work — but there are easy ways to change its default behaviour too.