NOTE: This methodology involves editing your computer's registry. If you're not comfortable with doing such, you should not proceed with the steps below. I accept no responsibility of any kind for any consequences if you choose to proceed. Back up your registry before undertaking the steps below.
1. Identify the file type that you wish to edit the description for.
In my example, I will be using "Adobe Acrobat Document", for which the extension is ".pdf" (see image below). 2. Open RegEdit and locate that extension.
RegEdit is a program that's included in Windows, which you can use to edit your computer's registry. You can open it by going to Start --> Run --> typing "regedit" and clicking OK. Once opened, expand a node called "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT" and scroll down until you find ".pdf" extension (see image below) 3. Locate the ProgramID and edit the description text string.
The arrow in the screenshot above points to AcroExch.Document, which is the ProgramID for a ".pdf" file on my machine. Scroll further down in "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT" to find it (see image below) Right-click on "(Default)" in the "Name" column and click on "Modify". Change the text to what you wish it to be and click "OK". Exit RegEdit and reboot. Your type column for that specific file will reflect the change of description. Voilà!
Boot note: Doing it from within XYplorer would have been awesome. Unfortunately, XY doesn't have a scripting command called "sleep", where XY waits for certain period of time before proceeding with the script. This is needed because the speed of how quickly values can be retrieved from the registry vary, but there's no way to take that into account in XY's scripting. If we had "sleep", then I could have integrated that with my VBScript file that would do the searching then use XY to create a custom registry file that would be injected silently into the registry. If only there was "sleep"...
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