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Windows Photo Viewer (formerly Windows Picture and Fax Viewer) is an image viewer included with the Windows NT family of operating systems. com /en-US /windows7 /View-and-use-your-pictures-in-Windows-Photo-Viewer hqx extension, try searching for "hqx file" (with the quotes).Imaging for Windows, Windows Photo Gallery Use an ordinary search engine such as Google () to search for references to the filename extension. Where is the filename extension (without the dot) that you want to learn more about. Microsoft has put together a simple "extension finder" web site, intended for use with the "Use the Web service to find the correct program" feature that appears when you try to open a file with an extension that Windows doesn't recognize. If you still can't find a file's type from its extension, there are several more good sources: If all else fails, you can open just about any file in Notepad although nontext files will look mostly like gibberish, you may get clues in some of the excerpts of readable text you'll see. You can open many of these file types only if you have the appropriate application. And you might be thrown off by an improperly named file, or by an application using a standard filename extension for a nonstandard purpose. Table D-1 list many system extensions, but third-party applications use literally thousands of file formats. To subsequently change an association once it has been made, right-click on the file and select Open With, or select Properties and then click Change. If you double-click on an unknown file type, the Open With dialog box appears, allowing you to make a new association.
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To enable the display of filename extensions, open Windows Explorer, go to Control Panel Folder Options View tab, and turn off the "Hide extensions for known file types option. Although direct associations are made between some files without extensions and the applications needed to open them, in most cases the association is between an extension and a Registry setting that tells the system what application to use. This is unfortunate, because they play a major role in the way Windows decides what application will be used to open a file, as well as which files will be visible when opening files in a given application. This appendix lists many of the most common filename extensions that you'll find on your system, that you might download, or that you have received over the Internet.Įxtensions were universally used on DOS and Windows 3.1 files, but Microsoft has gone to some difficulty to hide them in Windows Vista.
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