The next section down controls how icons behave when your View menu is set to view by Icon (or by Small Icon). We both use the Straight grid and keep the Always Snap to grid box checked. This is not too important if you always use the view by Name option, but it can be handy from time to time.
The bottom section List Views is extremely important, but poorly described in all the "How to use your Mac" literature that is packaged with the computer. There are three pictures of a hand writing on a piece of paper. Choose the middle sized one (click on the little radio button below it) this gives you nice little color (& custom) icons next to the names of folders, files and programs. Choosing the smallest hand-writing picture will replace those nice icons with crummy generic little boxes next to folder names. Choosing the biggest hand-writing picture produces large icons which take up too much space and force you to scroll far too much to see your complete directory.
 Continuing on, check the box next to Show disk info in header. This will display in the title bar of every window how many items are in each folder and the amount of stuff stored on your hard drive (MB in disk), as well as, how much free space is still available on your hard drive . For floppy diskettes (or external hard drives) the "disk info" header will list the amount of storage space used and free on that diskette (or external hard drive).
Do NOT check the box next to Calculate folder sizes. If you check this option, your computer will waste a lot of processor time constantly recalculating the contents of every folder on your hard drive. If you have it checked, you'll actually hear your hard drive just chugging away working on this unnecessary info.
The right hand column of check boxes, controls what information is listed with each filename in your directory windows. We find it useful to select
- Show size
- Show kind
- Show date
but we leave unchecked the - Show label
- Show version
- Show comments
Please note, you won't see any of this info if you have chosen to view files and folders by Icon or by Small Icon. |