How in the Tech

Installing Applications Outside of “Program Files” by Default

By Adam Myers ⋅ August 26, 2008 ⋅ Tags: Customization, File Management

I enjoy a lean mean Vista machine. Perhaps it’s just a psychological habit, but very early on in my Windows 95 experience I began installing applications and games on a different hard drive, separate from my Windows installation. In that day and age, you’d often reinstall Windows at least once a year, if not every few months. By having your programs installed elsewhere, it was generally easier to format the Windows drive and reinstall with less of a concern of actually losing data outside of Windows itself. An example, Adobe Photoshop with numerous plugins would remain safe – though you would still need to run the installer to create the necessary registry entries, but your plugins generally were safe. Sure, you could remember to back those up pre-format – but this is just one example.

As you are likely aware, almost every program nowadays defaults to installing to C:\Program Files\. Sure, during the actual installation of the software you are generally presented with the option of changing the installation path – but I do find myself forgetting. Worse, some installers don’t provide the option. Here’s how to change that behavior once and for all.

1. Click Start and in the Start Search box type regedit.exe
2. Traverse the Registry Editor navigation tree on the left hand side down to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion



3. In the right pane, look for the key ProgramFilesDir -it likely has the value of C:\Program Files\. Double click this key and set it to whatever you desire for your default installation path.