Nicole has a new laptop with Windows Vista and it’s been a bit of an adjustment. One thing that has been a bit confusing is that Vista has changed some of the familiar folders like “Documents and Settings” (“Users” is the new preferred location and I have to say that I like the new name much better, since it’s intuitive, short, and doesn’t have spaces). Some of the old folders are still present in Vista but they’re not actually folders. Nor are they shortcuts or symlinks. They’re “junction points”, which are sort of the Windows analogue of Unix symlinks and they’ve been present for a while in Windows, but not used so much until Vista arrived.

Bob Kelley at realtime-vista.com has a nice little description of the junction points in Vista and how to use the dir /al command to see them.