Q: Please can you explain why when I send the files shown in the attached screenshot – Great Pictures and Road Trains – to other people some of them can’t open them? I sent my USB stick down to my grandson so he could see the road trains, but he could not open it. He could however open the music folder. No doubt there will be a simple answer to this.
A: The icon that’s displayed on your Explorer screen indicates that you don’t have a program associated with the file type. This may indicate that the file is in an obscure format which needs a particular program to open. More likely is that it’s been saved without an extension (the three or four characters after the dot). In either event Windows doesn’t know which program to use to open the file. We’d guess that these files are compressed in some way? Windows can only open standard .zip format files, if you’ve used a different compression format like .7zip or .rar then some additional software will be needed to open them. If they’re simply missing the extension – you can check by right-clicking on the file and choosing Properties – then all you need to do is rename them to put it back.
Unassociated files will display the mini-window icon
Originally featured in PCU126
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More likely no program on the computer recognizes the file. Yes, this can be fixed by installing an appropriate software or adding file extensions. .