Windows XP Professional: The Missing Manual

Tools Menu

This menu offers a handful of leftover commands that didn’t quite belong in any of the other menus.

Map Network Drive

This command, exclusively for people on a network, lets you assign a drive letter to a folder to which you’ve connected over the network. Keyboard equivalent: Alt+T, N.

Disconnect Network Drive

This command, also just for networked people, summons a dialog box that lets you delete a drive mapping you’ve established. Keyboard equivalent: Alt+T, D.

Synchronize

Synchronize, in Microsoft-ese, means, “copy files so both computers contain the identical contents.” Using the Briefcase, for example, you can ensure that your laptop and desktop computers contain the same updated files (see Section 20.8 for details). Synchronizing also means updating the Web pages you’ve told Internet Explorer that you want to read when you’re not online, a trick described in Section 11.1.6.6. Keyboard equivalent: Alt+T, S.

Folder Options

The dialog box summoned by this command lets you change several global desktop-window options. For example, you can specify that you want a new window to appear every time you double-click a folder (instead of the single-window approach); that you want one click, not two, to open a folder; and so on. You can read about these settings in detail starting on Section 3.2.4. Keyboard equivalent: Alt+T, O.