ssd for £100

[badass]

Anyone know if you can redirect the Users folder in Win 7?

Have you tried looking it up?
It's a registry hack in Windows XP and Server 2000/2003

[Syllopsium]

Yeah.. I reckon 80GB is quite a good size for a boot drive and a set of frequently used apps.

It is possible to redirect the users folder, in pretty much every version of Windows..

Probably isn't /quite/ 15 RPGs (Oblivion, Temple of Elemental Evil, Planescape:Torment, Fable, Dungeon Siege/Ultima V : Lazarus mod, Morrowind, Beyond Divinity, Divine Divinity plus the Ultima Collection - that's 10 games in itself, which is cheating a bit. Fallout 3 is still in shrinkwrap s are Gothic 1-3. Icewind Dale 2 is on my laptop, Ultima Underworld 1 and 2 are on the legacy DOS games box). Don't know if I can be bothered going back to Might and Magic VII which I have somewhere, and I never completed Summoner.

[scaryjim]

No need really with the introduction of libraries...

There's need to move Users off C: if you want to keep minimal stuff off your SSD, though

... you can move the documents folder and so on in exactly the same way that you did with Vista (and XP IIRC).

Have you tried looking it up? It's a registry hack in Windows XP and Server 2000/2003

Look it up? Hell no, I'm a lazy so'n'so!

Besides it was more of an idle question while I was thinking about it than a genuine query - At the minute I don't have the money for anything other than single large disk solutions so it's all a bit moot! if I can ever afford to have a special disk just for my OS I'll look into it properly

[jim]

There's need to move Users off C: if you want to keep minimal stuff off your SSD, though

Look it up? Hell no, I'm a lazy so'n'so!

Besides it was more of an idle question while I was thinking about it than a genuine query - At the minute I don't have the money for anything other than single large disk solutions so it's all a bit moot! if I can ever afford to have a special disk just for my OS I'll look into it properly

No, that's not what I meant. In Windows 7, MS introduced libraries for exactly this purpose. You can include multiple locations within the documents library, so for example C:\Users\John\Documents is in there, as is C:\Users\All Users\Documents, and E:\Storage\Documents could be in there as well, which would be your external storage. So you don't need to move your Documents any more, you just create a new folder in your storage drive, and drop a link to it into the particular library.

I've moved mine physically rather than use this method, but that's only because I had to move it in Vista, and I'm not sure that my game saves and so on would have continued to work properly after porting them across operating systems had I used the libraries function.

And as for physically moving the folders, it's not a registry hack at all in XP IIRC, that was a bit of a myth. You should be able to just right click on your documents folder and click properties, then go to the location tab and then click move. Job done! If that feature was only added in Vista, then I apologise, but I remember it being part of XP.

[scaryjim]

No, that's not what I meant. In Windows 7, MS introduced libraries for exactly this purpose. You can include multiple locations within the documents library, so for example C:\Users\John\Documents is in there, as is C:\Users\All Users\Documents, and E:\Storage\Documents could be in there as well, which would be your external storage.

But presumably when a user saved stuff from a program it would (by default) go into Users\username\Documents? In which case you'd still be filling up your SSD with stuff that could safely be on a mechanical drive

You should be able to just right click on your documents folder and click properties, then go to the location tab and then click move. Job done!

This does indeed work for XP (I just tried it to see!). Of course, that only moves "my documents" though - I'd be more interested in moving the entire profile space, so everything that would go under e.g. \Users\jim\ (\Documents and Settings\jim\ in XP, of course) could be moved. In Active Directory I know you can move AD user profiles to a separate drive (I did it for one of my clients so all user data was safely ensconsed on RAID and regularly backed up) but I wasn't sure if there was a way to specify this for local users...

As I said, should I ever be able to afford a small SSD as a boot drive, I'll investigate this properly

[jim]

But presumably when a user saved stuff from a program it would (by default) go into Users\username\Documents? In which case you'd still be filling up your SSD with stuff that could safely be on a mechanical drive

This does indeed work for XP (I just tried it to see!). Of course, that only moves "my documents" though - I'd be more interested in moving the entire profile space, so everything that would go under e.g. \Users\jim\ (\Documents and Settings\jim\ in XP, of course) could be moved. In Active Directory I know you can move AD user profiles to a separate drive (I did it for one of my clients so all user data was safely ensconsed on RAID and regularly backed up) but I wasn't sure if there was a way to specify this for local users...

As I said, should I ever be able to afford a small SSD as a boot drive, I'll investigate this properly

You're probably right with the first point - my understanding of libraries runs no further than what I've said already in this thread.

As for the second point, I've never really worried too much about it - I don't doubt that you can do it somehow, but I never really had any other data in the user folder worth worrying about - only documents, savegames, music, videos and photos were of notable size for me. Also, when I did a reinstall I wouldn't want to carry over the appdata folders and so on, so it made sense in my situation to leave them locally.

[[GSV]Trig]

I got my OCZ Agility drive for less than £100, yeah its only 30Gb but it makes an ideal boot drive, then a 60 Vertex for storage.

Not much space but then the server has everything on it these days...

[Pob255]

This does indeed work for XP (I just tried it to see!). Of course, that only moves "my documents" though - I'd be more interested in moving the entire profile space, so everything that would go under e.g. \Users\jim\ (\Documents and Settings\jim\ in XP, of course) could be moved. In Active Directory I know you can move AD user profiles to a separate drive (I did it for one of my clients so all user data was safely ensconsed on RAID and regularly backed up) but I wasn't sure if there was a way to specify this for local users...

Recently done something like this
Should still work as long as you have XP pro . . .
Ummm I cannot remember exactly
basically you create a folder where you want the user data to go, then you need to add in a cmd line command in to the boot up to assign that folder a drive letter, you can then set user profiles to that letter as default
The only issue with this is I think "default user" has to stay on c: and I've been catching more and more software saveing install data into the default user profile, not the all users or individual user
Ok not enough to bother a 30gb drive, just a network issue I've been having with so much ly written software recently.

[kalniel]

If there really are no tools to do this automatically, then perhaps just use junction to symbolically link the /user/ directory to a different drive.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s.../bb896768.aspx

[Boon72]

i won a Kingston 128gb SSD in a draw which i installed W7x64 which seems much faster than my Samsung F1 320gb hd, but the things i install games etc are all installed on the F1 not the SSD, like most things you can change where they install.

[TooNice]

Let's just leave this here for posterity...

I agree with him though. Visit this thread in a year