How to Change the Group by View of a Folder in Windows 10 tutorial

Hi @Shawn. I am trying to disable permanently the "Group by" of "My PC" in Explorer. I don't know if it's possible. In any case, the detail view columns are limited and the tutorials don't have information about exceptions, if there are any.

Hello mate,

You can't disable the "Group by" feature, but you can set it to Group by > (None) to not have the items in the folder grouped by anything.

Change Group by Folder View in Windows 10

Brink said:

Hello mate,
You can't disable the "Group by" feature, but you can set it to Group by > (None) to not have the items in the folder grouped by anything. Change Group by Folder View in Windows 10

This setting is permanent on all Explorer folders' displays as described in the tutorial, but not with the "My PC" display. Each time I set it to "None", but reverts to the categorized view after closing and reopening in the same session. I have 10 disk partitions.+ network and devices categorized.

Ah, ok. You meant the "This PC" view layout like below.

I tested setting to Group by > (None) on my system, closed File Explorer, reopened it, and it stuck for me.

You could try resetting folder views back to default to see if it may stick afterwards, but you will have to change all your folder views again.

Reset Folder View Settings to Default in Windows 10

You might back up your current folder views before resetting to make it easy to restore them.

Backup and Restore Folder View Settings in Windows 10

Thanks, it a good idea, and reverting the rest afterwards is not a problem and thanks for the tutorial links.

Please let us know how it went.

Brink said:

Please let us know how it went.

It went badly. Definitely not a recommended procedure to delete "Group By" in the registry. At least, not without a mirror backup! On reboot Windows would not start. No logo no messages nothing. So I restored it. Shawn, my apologies for wasting your time.
The deactivation of "Group By" remains in the same session. After a reboot it reverts to grouping. I can only hope that this post reaches Microsoft's eyes.

Just to clarify, was this after resetting folder views back to default?

Just a confirmation, the Group by has worked for me as described in all areas of File Explorer where the View tab is showing on the Toolbar. The only place it's not available is in the right-click Save as or in IE's Save as process where the View tab does not appear on the Toolbar.

Brink said:

Just to clarify, was this after resetting folder views back to default?

The delay to reply was unrelated to this topic. I was preparing to add a disc drive. The preferred view is working now, and here is the step by step list of what I did, and it includes an additional step at the end. I also rebooted after each step.

1. Reset all views to default.
2. Rebooted.
3. Changed the "My Pc" view to Details and set the "Group By" to [None]. But left everything else at default.
4. Rebooted.
5. "My Pc" view retained the selected setting, alphabetically ordered "Details" without grouping.
6. Switched to Drive C:\, set it to "Details" and changed the column order to "Name, Size Type and Date". Grouping is available but not applied by the default settings.
7. Rebooted.
8. "My Pc" lost the settings, reverted to "Tile" and "Group by" was active again.
9. Reconfigured to "Details" and set the "Group By" to [None].
10. Rebooted.
11. "My Pc" view retained the selected settings. Alphabetically ordered "Details" without grouping.