Windows Explorer, by default, displays a device’s name before the associated drive letter. While devices such as hard drives, thumb drives, or network mount points can be given unique or otherwise distinguishing names after more than just a few it quickly becomes difficult to find the desired device. Even still, and perhaps this is an old school train of thought, but many still refer to devices as their physical drive letter within Windows – rather than the name to begin with. Generally, Windows is installed on the c drive even though the hard drive or partition could be called Local Disk, Windows, or OS.

Drive letters remove ambiguity! As such, doesn’t it make since that the letters should be displayed first within a device listing? Windows references a specific registry key that controls this view, so if we are in agreement then here’s how to flip the names and drive letters.

Open the Windows Registry Editor.

Traverse to the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer.

Create a New->DWORD (32 bit) Value titled ShowDriveLettersFirst.

The value assigned to ShowDriveLettersFirst will determine the behavior of Explorer’s device view.

• 0 is the default view, as you see it now.
• 1 will show the local drive letters after their name (like now) but show network drive letters before their name.
• 2 will display no drive letters whatsoever.
• 4 will show drive letters of both local and network before their name – which is ultimately what we want here.

In order to see the results of our change you will need to restart Windows since Explorer is a critical process and shouldn’t simply be forcefully killed.