Regarding default installation locations

[dinosaur369]

I was wondering if win 7 default program installations can be change to other directory?

 

[Nothinman]

Do you mean the stuff that comes bundled with Win7 or the default location of 3rd party apps? If the former, no, MS puts their shit whever they want. If the latter, that depends on if the installer lets you change it. And even then chances are it'll still put some common files on your system drive.

 

[dinosaur369]

Do you mean the stuff that comes bundled with Win7 or the default location of 3rd party apps? If the former, no, MS puts their shit whever they want. If the latter, that depends on if the installer lets you change it. And even then chances are it'll still put some common files on your system drive.

Thanks for your reply, guess it could not allow me to set my programs defaults and third party to the bigger hdd directory. I really didn't realize that win7 could easily occupy so much of my 60gb ssd which I set as my primary drive.

 

[Nothinman]

If you mean default location that apps save to, that could possibly be changed by changing all of your profile directories but that would probably be a PITA since you're already installed and going.

Also, I'm surprised whenever someone says they're surprised at Windows' size. It's been steadily growing since it's creation so why would you be surprised that it easily takes >20G or so now? If you want small, there are lots of choices out there. My home Linux installation is ~14G and that's large, I could probably trim that down a lot by removing stuff that I don't use.

 

[ViRGE]

As far as programs are concerned, there's no way to change the default installation directory unless you relocate Program Files entirely. That's tied in to the ProgramFilesDir environment setting, so an application is always going to try to default to installing in wherever ProgramFilesDir points (and if it doesn't point to Program Files, that's very bad).

Your options basically boil down to deciding what you want to keep on your SSD and what you don't. Relocating your special user folders (My Documents/Music/Movies) is trivial; relocating the entire user directory is harder. You could save a ton of space by relocating Program Files, but then parts of your OS is not on the SSD, which is counterproductive from a performance standpoint.