Geekery ensues: if your eyes glaze over, just move along
Windows gets fucking disgruntled when you try to move your Documents and Settings folder:
Me: How about I put all my settings on the other drive, in case I ever reformat?
Windows: No. Way. You can’t copy them, you can’t rename them, you can’t even look at them.
Me: Well, I hate to disappoint you, but I already have, no thanks to you. That’s what boot disks are for.
Windows: But-but-but, well, fine! But I’ll ignore them.
Me: You can’t ignore them, I’ve changed the registry in all places to refer to the new location. There they are, see? How ya like me now?
Windows: I’m. Not. Listening. Lalalalalalalala! *continues to use old folder anyway*
Me: *restores registry back up and throws up hands in frustration*
Instead of moving the folder, I’ve created a new folder and designated it as the “my documents” folder.
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/win_xp_mydocs.htm
Unfortunately, I am speaking of much more than just My Documents. I want -all- of my settings for -all- users on the D: drive.
I use TweakUI, so if I want to just change the My Documents for a user, that’d be simple. But why would I do something simple? *smirk*
Try X-Setup Pro – it’s kind of like TweakUI but much more powerful. I even actually paid for the registered version :P. It’s an amazing plug-in based windows/registry customization tool, and it allows you to change things that tweakUI never touched.
Other than that, I also hate ‘my documents’, so I have a C:\incoming folder I use for anything I want to look at, then organize later. So whenever I download or work with any files, I always use that as my default folder. I never really have any instance of having to move from ‘my documents’ any more (after XSetup and consistently using \incoming)… so it is possible.
I find changing system settings manually within the registry doesn’t always guarantee the change will stick just because there may be other registry keys that reference or check the original value, and get confused if it’s changed ‘unofficially’ :).
Definitely try X-Setup Pro
(btw, I tried changing my ‘my documents’ location to c:\incoming, and all it did was make the other annoying default folders ‘my music’, ‘my pictures’, etc all be created there whenever I used a program that requested those folders, so I left the default location as it was, and manually used \incoming wherever possible)
I use a “Save” folder as my location for all data, actually. It’s very convenient.
stupid windows!
It is impressively difficult, isn’t it? I wage a constant struggle against my wife’s PC, which has a nearly full C drive (with Windows on it), but a spacious D drive. She saves things wherever Windows suggests, and Windows inevitably suggests the overburdened C drive, no matter what I do in the registry.
further proof that Windows is really a stubborn woman.
Your post really could have ended here:
“Windows gets fucking disgruntled when you try to…
And we would have understood perfectly. After the “try to…”, any wildcard statement will bring pretty much the same result. I’m not even some geeky Linux fan (waves at Lee and others…), but I hold out no false hope for sensibility of use from my lovely OS.
you are a funny funny man :)