I did solve the problem. Microsoft Office isn't in my Start Menu, but Microsoft word office is on my desktop as an icon. That works for me. I will go back and try to do what you suggested. Thanks so much. I feel pretty good when I goof something up and then here I am and poof!! I fix it with all you gals and guys helping me out. Thanks again Marie

Unless configured otherwise Vista accounts should by default save to their respective profile default file locations. Shall I assume MS Word is the app in question? If so the default should be My Documents. What does the Word MRU show if you go to File->Open? Was a memory key in use at the time? Finally if you know the filename or type of document, do a search for it. Having said that, I am not a fan of Vista's default search by comaparion to previous Windows versions. For Vista and 7 I use Nirsoft's SearchMyFiles. Located here You would enter your search criteria in the "Files Wildcard" field.

Bob - Good Grief is right. But it's probably not as bad as it sounds. One of the problems is that before I found this forum a year ago (and had some sense of saving files to the appropriate place), not only did my husband and I just save files (with no regard to where they were being placed) - we also had 2 different computer guys help at various times - and I've discovered that one of them took it upon himself to set up some folders and put items there (he set up a Lynn's documents) when he transferred data from one computer to another. Now I can see why he set up my own folder (since my husband and I shared a computer in those days) - but he never told me he was doing that- so lo and behold - I have an entire Lynn's documents folder that I never use but contains some of my older files. yeah - I guess it's a lot to sort. Personally, your method makes sense to me - just set up folders in the C drive for the categories I'm interested in. I'm now the only one on my computer - so I don't think I need a "my documents" folder (and certainly not a separate "Lynn's documents" folder). I am so glad to have found this forum and decided to get mastery and comprehension of my computer. Having professionals set things up - but not bother telling you what and why they did things - just complicates everything. And the pictures are also a mess bc. this helpful computer guy put picasa on my pc - which grabbed every picture - so that many pictures appear in picasa and elsewhere. It's the picture finding and organizing that seems the most daunting. Videos and music I've done myself in the past year - no one else has touched it but me. Word files are manageable too. BP - my question about the Tivo files is that I want to sit in my living room, have Tivo search my computer to see what's on it. That's what I'm thinking has to be in the Tivo desktop program. When I'm at my computer, I think I can find the videos anywhere - I'm just thinking that no matter where they came from (Tivo desktop, hulu, my camcorder, edited in Videoredo), that I might somehow have to move them all to My Tivo Recordings folder in order to access it using the Tivo and watching tv. Do I have that right? Jemdandy - that's one interesting way to approach the 2 drives - one for programs and one for data files. But then I'd be backing up data files to yet another place. I have a 500GB hard drive and am thinking of adding a second 1TB hard drive. So both drives have lots of room. Except for video files, I would think my c drive could easily handle my programs and data files (music, documents and pictures) - and the software and those files could be on the c drive and backed up to the second internal drive. Is there a reason - in terms of improved performance, etc - to use the c drive only for software? Does that add an extra step if I want to use one of my software programs (say photo editing) and have to go to the other drive to get the actual photos to work on? Or is it just as quick to run a program on one drive and get the data from the other? [Okay - good grief, it is]. Thanks everyone. Lynn.

Many programs, including Office, save files to the My Documents folder by default. If you click "save" and then "ok" they'll end up in My Documents. After you click save you can navigate to another folder if you choose and subsequent saves of that document will end up there as well. If you want to change the default folder, you will have to do that on a application by application basis, generally under something like Settings in the tool menu.