If your PC is connected to the network, you can map a server on the network (a remote resource) to a drive on your local system. When you map a drive, you associate a drive letter with a path. It enables you to instantly jump to a destination without having to go through a series of time-consuming steps. It saves you time and energy; however, mapped drives can also cause some confusion. If you have a ‘Local’ profile, and use another machine on campus, you may find that drive letters do not map to the same location as yours. If you switch to a ‘Roaming’ profile you won’t experience that problem.

To map a drive:

1. Right click on the My Computer icon on your desktop
2. Click on Map Network Drive... to spawn the dialog box shown below

3. Select any drive letter not in use

4. Either browse for the folder or type in the path. The path consists of three parts: a server name, a share name, and an optional filename. These components are combined with a backslash and adhere to this basic format:

Where ‘servername’ is the name of the network file server, ‘sharename’ is the name of a network or shared folder and ‘filename’ is the optional file path. For example, if I wanted to access Watershed, a temporary storage space at Malaspina dedicated to large files such as videos, I’d enter the following path:

In this case, ‘discovery’ is the server name and ‘watershed’ is the folder.

5. Click on ‘Reconnect at logon’ if you want this mapped drive available every time you log on and click ‘Finish’
6. In My Computer or Explorer you should now see a new drive.