Moving your Programs and User Documents folders in Windows 7

If you are looking to get a little more performance out of your Windows 7 64-bit installation or just looking for some security by separating your User files and Program Files from your System drive then this is a simple, 'lite" way of moving the bulk of your Programs and User Documents on to a new partition or drive.

First of all, moving your Program Files directory is only really going to work if you've just done a fresh install. I've read up and even tried this tutorial and my big problem was that it broke my Windows Update which I am kinda keen on keeping. It seems the reality of Windows 7 is that you can't separate some of the core components of a Windows install onto two separate partitions or drives without messing shit up. What I am proposing here is a much simpler, but lighter version - it would not be as effective or efficient to what is proposed on the aforementioned tutorial but it does provide me with a performance boost and a level of security by putting my User Data (My Documents, Desktop etc.) and my Program Files onto a different drive (or partition if you've done it that way).

Personally, for a Windows 7 Install I usually have 2 physical hard drives, each partitioned twice.

• Drive 1, Partition 1: ~35gb for System Install.
• Drive 1, Partition 2: User files and Temp Win Folders
• Drive 2, Partition 1: Pagefile system
• Drive 2, Partition 2: Program files

This post is split up into two parts, Part A deals with the simple task of moving the User Data which you can do whenever you want, it doesn't rely on a new installation. Part B deals with moving your Program Files, in my own backwards way.

Part A: The Easy Part - Moving your User Data

Windows 7 (and I think Windows Vista also) is pretty smart. The sometimes clever nerds at Microsoft know you don't always want your Documents and Music and Photos/Videos on your C:\ or System drive so this process is pretty straight forward.

1. Go to your User Folder (Go to Start Menu and select YourUserName from it). This will open up the Explorer with all your 11 standard User Folders in it. (Note: Don't go to C:\Users in explorer, make sure to go through the Start Menu).
2. Right Click on any of the folders, My Documents for example and click Properties.

3. Click on the Location Tab and enter the new location for this folder (for example, change it from C:\Users\JohnDoe\desktop to E:\John\desktop) and press OK.

4. If the new location doesn't exist, it'll ask to create it... No worries go for it.

5. It'll usually ask you to combine the folders and move existing files to avoid duplicates, MAKE SURE TO SAY YES or else you end up with all sorts of silliness.

6. You're good to go. I recommend going through all the key 11 folders in your User Data folder and moving them all to another partition or drive. What is the advantage of doing this? All your downloads and documents as well as your desktop (especially your desktop for some people, like my dad) is where you keep most of your files, not to mention the Photos and Videos folder. By separating it from your system drive you can do a couple of things. Firstly you can keep your system drive to a relatively small partition, reducing seek times, because you know it's not going to fill up with junk from the internet and your camera. Secondly, you can put all those folders on to another drive that is possibly running a backup RAID (RAID 1) to protect your data and avoid losing 10 years of photography and family videos.

Part B: The more complicated part - Moving Program Files

As I mentioned, this tutorial provides a solution to moving your Program Files (and Program Files (x86) in 64bit Windows) straight after a fresh install and providing syslinks for Windows to find the Programs. I tried this and it broke my Windows update, among things. I'd love it if the solution worked seamlessly but it didn't for me, so I went for a softer solution. With this method some of the ProgramData (literally a hidden folder called ProgramData) will stay on your system drive as well as some of the basic applications that come with windows after a fresh install. So Windows will still be using that system drive to read and write information to the ProgramData folder. But I mainly use Adobe Creative Suite and some web development software and I have noticed increased performance doing it this way:

1. After a fresh install, copy the Program Files and Program Files (x86) folders from C:\ (your system drive) to their new drive (such as P:\ for example - which is what I use). Copy everything.
2. Next, you want to make it so Windows reads P:\Program Files as the default directory for installing your programs. In the Run Command Line (Windows Key + R) type in regedit and press okay. (You'll need administrator privileges to continue, a box might pop up letting you know this and Click Continue. The Registry Editor will pop up on screen.

3. Like a basic "Windows Explorer" navigate to Computer > HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SOFTWARE > Microsoft > Windows. Expand the Windows folder and click on the CurrentVersion folder (you don't need to expand it).
4. A whole lot of keys will come up, CommonFilesDir, ProgramFilesDir, etc. you double click on everything that has the C:\Program Files or C:\Program Files (x86) path specified and change them to your new location (ie. P:\Program Files or where ever you copied your program files)

So CommonFilesDir would change from C:\Program Files\Common Files to P:\Program Files\Common Files and CommonFilesDir (x86) would change from C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files to P:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files and so on and so forth... matching the old directory paths to the new ones...

5. IMPORTANT If you are using 64bit of course it doesn't stop there, you have to now navigate to Computer > HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SOFTWARE > Wow6432Node > Microsoft > Windows and do the same there (click on the CurrentVersion folder and changing the values of the Program Files paths on all the keys there).

6. Now you can install new Programs and everything will default to your new directories. This is a softer way of moving your default Program Files directories. The benefit of this of course is that all my main programs such as Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator or your other major applications will run from a different drive than my system, increasing performance.

Summary

So this is nothing fantastic, but just a simple tip and something I always do after a fresh install and it has worked well for me. Good luck with yer own self.