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