MAMEWorld Forums - Hardware - Re: SSD/Windows usage questions

> Most newish apps properly respect being installed onto secondary drives. In
> particular, almost everything using the built-in Windows installer (.MSI files)
> instead of something custom tends to work.

I'm doing that already, I have most of my audio toys installed on a second drive and it works fine, patches install properly etc.
I've also found that some old games and other software work better when installed to a non-system drive (or in the documents folder) where they are free to write to files when running without admin rights.
If you install these into Program Files (x86) they'll write to copies in the hidden "virtualstore" folder buried somewhere inside the current user folder, but that doesn't seem to always work like its supposed to, especially with old software.

But..I was thinking more along the lines of changing an environment variable (I think that's what it's called, or is that an obsolete term now) that overrides the default location of the user/program files folders once and for all so that I don't have to manually change the path every time I install something, or manually reconfigure every app that wants to write stuff to "My Documents" on the system drive. I'd like to have it work seamlessly.

For example, the message store folder that Windows Live Mail uses for all email is hidden somewhere in the user folder - you can change the path to this folder inside WLMail, but if the default location for the whole Users folder tree was already on D: I wouldn't have to worry about it. It's the same with games, configuration files and game saves always end up somewhere in Users/Sune/(..)/ and this is normally not configurable.

On XP Professional this is something you would do in the Group Policy Editor I think?
I have no idea where to do this on Windows 7.

S