Win 7 sort by date issue - 2011 files/folders now "A Long Time Ago"

Hello there & Happy New Year. :)

I have encountered this particular inconvenience on the 2nd day of 2012 while i was transfering photos and files into my PC with Win7.

In my Win7 PC, all files/folders created or modified within Dec'2011 and earlier are now all grouped under as "A Long Time Ago". This happens when I changed the folder to be "Group by Date" or "Group by Date Modified" with a combo of "Sort by type". I tried sorting in different ways of view to see if I can get it back to what it should be. Then i realised even folder newly created on 25 Dec 2011 is also grouped as "A Long Time Ago" too. I am not sure if this is an intended feature.

The only helpful part is that i will still see the newer files in chronological order if I sort by date modified on top of group by date modified.

I have been using this setting for folder view even for Win XP. As for Win XP, i will get "Yesterday", "Last Week", "Last Month", "Last Year", "Two Years Ago" and ultimately the whole chunk of much older files under "A Long Time Ago". Such perfect chronological order.

I tried to google for a while and not much of returns to this issue I am having. Perhaps majority of people does not group their files/folders in such way. But for me, I like the way how it was displayed that I know i have edited/created/moved whichever files/folders last year, the previous month or yesterday.

I hope someone is able to enlighten me on this one and for others who is also looking for an answer. Thank you.

Same for me! Must be a Windows 7 thing, and hopefully someone at Microsoft is onto a fix.

This issue is caused by Windows 7 Library.

Solution
Open the folder or folders in library (you can open "My Documents" then navigate to that folder from there)

Enable "Menu" view on the library explorer window.(Organize > Layout > Menu Bar)

Click View > Menu > Group by None

I hope that helps!

It's just the way Windows 7 implements the Group By groups. Unfortunately, there's currently no way to change that with the native options. I just simply don't group my files to avoid that. It seems a bit redundant when you're already sorting by date.

FliGi7 said:

It's just the way Windows 7 implements the Group By groups. Unfortunately, there's currently no way to change that with the native options. I just simply don't group my files to avoid that. It seems a bit redundant when you're already sorting by date.

The user that had this problem on our network did not use groups, but for some reason or another it switched two folders to group view, my instructions allowed that user to keep the settings they were familiar with.