Windows' File Explorer has a ton of powerful sorting options, but somehow, I'd never noticed this one before: in the Details view, you can sort the recycle bin by original location, date deleted, and more.

Windows: Microsoft made some useful improvements to Windows Explorer in Windows 8, but also (inexplicably) took some things away. OldNewExplorer gives you the best of both worlds: use the Windows 8 features you like, and bring back the Windows 7 features you miss.

Thinking about Windows Explorer may make you yawn, but you spend a lot of time in it every day. It's your hub for everything on your system, and it has a lot of cool stuff built-in you probably haven't noticed. Here are a few tips and tricks for getting more out of it.

Windows Search can take you far, but if you want to browse a folder's contents with advanced sorting parameters -- like a range of "date modified" or multiple file types -- you can do so with just a few clicks.

There are a hundred ways to copy files from one place to another with Windows Explorer, but copying to another folder from the right-click menu has remained strangely absent. No more!

Windows Explorer's new ribbon has gotten a lot of flak from people who prefer their traditional menus. When it comes to search, however, Windows 8's ribbon gives you a lot of options you might not have otherwise seen.

Windows: Want to quickly run a command from within Windows Explorer? It turns out Windows has a built-in way to do this. Simply type in "cmd" in the address bar, and it will open the command prompt with the path to your current folder already set.

Windows: Windows Explorer is far from the most advanced file browser out there, and Windows has lots of other options. One of the best, XYplorer, is available for free today only, down from its usual price of $US30.

Windows: Do you want tabs in Windows Explorer to work the same way they do in Google Chrome? You can now mimic the look and functionality of Chrome's tabs with an app called Clover.

Windows: Lots of videos have built-in thumbnails in Windows Explorer, so you can see a quick preview of each file, but this only works with popular video formats that work out-of-the-box in Windows. Media Preview is a small utility that adds preview thumbnails to nearly every video format you can think of.

Windows: Searching for files in Windows can be easy if you know what you're looking for, and infuriating if you don't remember a file name, path or folder location. 7Files, a free file browser for Windows 7 systems, makes searching easy by highlighting often-used files, organising your files by date, file type and file extension, and showing you most recently opened or modified files together for quick reference.

Tablet users won't be the only ones impressed by Windows 8 -- some big changes have come to the desktop too, especially the newest version of Windows Explorer. Here are some of the biggest changes in Windows' default file manager.

Windows Explorer's command bar can contain some useful buttons, but you can get the same features from keyboard shortcuts. This small utility hides the command bar completely.

Windows only: MediaTab is a free program that provides tag and other technical information about audio and video files, like MediaInfo, but is integrated into Windows Explorer, so you don't need to open another application to get these details.

Windows 7 only: Windows Explorer's context menu is handy, but if you'd like easier access to your most-used features, CustomExplorerToolbar can put a number of different buttons right in Explorer's toolbar.

Windows only: FastPreview adds a big thumbnail to every image's context menu in Windows Explorer, while also giving you quick access to a full-res preview as well as loads of data about the file.

Windows 7: The preview pane in Windows Explorer for Windows 7 is much better than the version in Vista (with built-in support for more file types), and it has a handy keyboard shortcut: ALT+P.

Windows only: If you've ever had to move a few files around in Windows, you know what it's like having what seems like a hundred Explorer windows open at a time. QTTabBar gets rid of that annoyance by bringing tabbed browsing to Windows Explorer.

If you find that you need to refer to your drives by letter more often than nickname, flipping through the Windows Explorer sidebar can be just a little annoying. Here's how to show those letters first in your list of connected drives.