Tip & How To about Microsoft Windows XP Professional

Use Two hard drives keep Windows Running Fast on C:\ moving your ProgramFiles to D:\

Posted by Owen Stephen Dawson on Tuesday, March 23, 2010

I like to keep my main drive running mean and lean with mainly just the OS running on my C: drive

On my second drive I usually call this D: I like to install the majority of all my programs however, windows always wants to install programs to “c:Program Files” to avoid changing this everytime copy and paste the bold into a reg file and double click it.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersion]
"ProgramFilesDir"="D:Program Files"
"CommonFilesDir"="D:Program FilesCommon Files"
"ProgramFilesPath"=hex(2):25,00,50,00,72,00,6f,00,67,00,72,00,61,00,6d,00,46,
00,69,00,6c,00,65,00,73,00,25,00,00,00

Remember you have to reboot for your changes to show also the Common Files will need to be changed the hex code is the %ProgramFiles% declaration.

NOTE: I change my CD/DVD-ROM to either V: W: or R: using the Computer Management Disk Manager to keep it out of the way