Windows woes

[Deewiant]

Sean Kelly wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>>
>> The bug with the Windows home directories, and why I don't use them,
>> is they insist on putting spaces in the directory names. This hoses us
>> command line users.
> 
> It's possible to move home directories with a bit of hacking, though
> some programs do seem to hard-code path names when they shouldn't.  I
> tried renaming "Program Files" as well, but with less success.  Even MS
> apps seem to expect stuff to live there no matter what the registry
> says.  Ultimately, I just gave up on the whole experiment as too
> complicated to be worthwhile.
> 
> 
> Sean

I've renamed Program Files, and it's actually rarer than I would have thought
that programs want to install to C:\Program Files. Of course, this requires that
you change some registry keys to point to your directory instead of the default.

The one "big" case I remember was that the ATI Catalyst video drivers wanted to
put something there - I can't remember what it was - and they also tended to pop
up with errors when I tried to force them into my D:\Programs directory. This
was reason enough for me to switch to the third-party Omega drivers, which have
worked fine.

Other than that, only one or two programs have wanted, by default, to install to
C:\Program Files, but it's hardly troublesome to just manually tell the
installation program where you want it.

Using a different path for My Documents is far more painless. Even Microsoft's
own Tweak UI (for Windows XP) lets you change that:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx

The only trouble is that you still end up with "My xxx" in your My Documents
folder, regardless of what you name the latter. Nothing's forcing you to use
those directories for anything, though.