There are certain rules you must follow when creating new files and folders:

  1. To create a new folder, right-click and hover over the word "New", and a menu will pop up. Select "New Folder" and a folder appears. To create some other type of file, select the file type you want on the "New" menu instead (text document, rich text format, bitmap image, etc.) The file will be created on the desktop, or if you have Windows Explorer open, the working directory.
  2. As soon as the folder or file is created, you are given the option to give it a name. If you opt not to use a name, the default name (i.e., "New Folder") is used instead.
  3. As with other Windows versions, files' and folders' names are not case-sensitive. For example, the names "card", "Card", and "cArd" are all recognized as identical names.
  4. The name of a folder or file cannot contain any colons, slashes, asterisks, question marks, quotation marks, or the symbols <, >, or |. These symbols are reserved for internal identification of Windows files and folders. For example, your desktop is actually a folder, and it is internally recognized as "C:\Users\X\Desktop", where "X" is replaced with the username you use on your PC, so any file names with colons or slashes would lead to internal confusion.
  5. Certain names are reserved despite not containing any invalid characters. You cannot use any of the names "aux", "con", "nul", "prn", as they are reserved for internal use by Windows. Attempting to use any of them results in the error message: "The specified device name is invalid". You also cannot use "COM" or "LPT" followed by a single 0-9 symbol. These stand for the communication port and the parallel port, respectively.
  6. Because of the case-insensitivity of names, as highlighted in bullet 3, attempts to name a folder or file "Con" (with a capital C) will be rejected in the same way as attempts to use "con" in all lowercase, or "CON" in all capitals. The same thing, of course, applies to the other reserved words highlighted in bullet 5 as well.
  7. Two folders within the same directory cannot share identical names. Likewise, two files with the same file extension, within the same directory, cannot share identical names.
  8. Since folders do not have extensions, you cannot have a folder whose name matches that of an existing file followed by its extension. For example, the extension ".txt" is used for text documents, so you cannot simultaneously have a text document named "Fun" and a folder named "Fun.txt" in the same directory.