Making Your Folders Totally Invisible!

Sometime during November, i wrote a post entry entitled "Privacy: the Best Policy" which i discussed on some methods on how you can secure your privacy on your computer. At that time, i promised you that i'll relay something on turning your folder or file totally invisible in order to hide your sensitive stuffs from 'sneaks' and 'privacy crashers'. I apologize for the delay if you had hoped for that piece of information and i had kept you waiting for about a month or so.

Here's an argument: supposed that you want the ultimate protection for your sensitive folder/file via the "cloaking" technique instead of the icon-and-name customization. There ARE two related techniques, and they had been around for some time; only problem is people did not realize or often forget to merge these two invisibility techniques together to form the ultimate invisibility effect!

To make a folder TOTALLY invisible from prying eyes, we must do the below two tweaks (There are no restrictions as to which one you try out first):

1. Make the folder's icon invisible

2. Make the name of the folder invisible/disable text-showing under icons

Below is a brief tutorial for the above two steps. Follow correctly, and you'll have a TOTALLY invisible folder in no time!!!


Tweak 1: To make a folder's icon invisible
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1. Right-click on the icon of the folder you want to hide and select 'Properties'

2. Select the 'Customize' tab

3. Select 'Change icon'

4. Scroll along the list of icons until you found an invisible folder icon

5. Select the icon and apply it. Notice that the icon of your folder is totally invisible, leaving only the name!

Of course, all of this would be relatively pointless without making the name invisible! Making a folder's name invisible can be quite tricky/frustrating and i urge users to try some patience if they faced some problem in applying this next step.


Tweak 2: To make a folder icon's text invisible/disable text-showings under folder icon
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1. From your keyboard, press the function key "num lock" to turn it on (should be easy for a desktop). For laptops, I'm not quite sure if the keyboards of all laptops are standardized, but in my case where i'm using a Compaq laptop, i turn on num lock by pressing the 'fn' button and scroll lock together.


2. Right-click on the invisible folder which you want its name to be "invisibled" and select 'rename'.

3. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT. What you need to do now is to hold the ALT key down. With the ALT key held down and using the numeric keypad (again, if you're using a laptop, be aware of where your numeric keypad is alternately located), type the number '255' then release the ALT key and press enter to complete the renaming procedure.


4. If you had succeeded, you'll noticed that your invisible folder had now completely disappeared from view!!!

Don't worry that you have lost your folder. Try click-dragging your mouse over the area where your invisible folder is located and you'll notice a text-based highlight; there's your invisible folder...:)

An interesting aspect about this whole folder-invisibling thing is like this fictional example: supposed you're a very organized person and you created multiple folders for the purpose of hiding multiple types of sensitive stuffs. For example, you've created three folders: one is for storing your text-based journal, one is for storing porn/horny stuffs and another one is for storing your messenger's chat logs. In such as scenario, the invisible icon tweak is not affected but the text-hiding tweak will require an extension as demonstrated below:

For the journal folder's text: [ALT+255]

For the porn folder's text: [ALT+255], [CTRL+'+'], [ALT+255]

For the chat logs folder's text: [ALT+255], [CTRL+'+'], [ALT+255], [CTRL+'+'], [ALT+255]

To put it simply, you must add the same amount of [ALT+255] according to the number of folders that you want invisible ACCORDINGLY. If an existing folder is given an invisible name of two [ALT+255], then any new folder that you wanted to have its text invisible must not bear the same amount of two [ALT+255].


That's all for the tutorial. Now you can do whatever you want to do with that invisible folder: dump it deep in your system, directly on your desktop, in an empty folder where people would less likely found out there's an invisible folder there....just do anything that you think will make it even more secure. Best of all, no money is needed!!! All you need is spending a little time in making your folder entirely invisible!!!