HOW TO CHANGE THE DEFAULT SAVE AS OR OPEN LOCATION

On the left-hand side of the Save As dialog box sits a Save In sidebar; in it are common locations where you might want to save a fi le. To add your own folders to this list, type gpedit.msc in the Run box (or search box in Vista), then navigate to User Confi guration, Administrative Templates, Windows Components, Windows Explorer, Common Open File Dialog; then, double-click Items Displayed in Places Bar. Here you can add up to fi ve locations, including remote folders residing on your home network (e.g., \\ MaxPC-Quad\Pictures).










I’ve been annoyed that I’ve not been able to change the default Save As/Open locations, as well as changing the 5 options I get on the Places Bar. Here’s what it looks like default:

GPUNow, there are two ways of changing this, this first one uses the GPEdit or Group Policy Editor app which you might remember from my post on branding Internet Explorer. Here’s how we go about changing it:  

•  In the start-menu, open “Run” 
• Type “gpedit.msc” and hit enter
•  In the group policy editor, navigate to: User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Windows Explorer\Common Open File Dialog 
•  Open the entry called Items displayed in Places Bar Set the entry to Active, and configure at will