KWB Technological Enterprises

This is one of the fastest ways to get windows to run better and it also helps protect your data. Windows loves having free space on its system drive. One way to give it the space it wants is never store data files, pictures, or documents on the same drive as windows. Another reason to do this, and it could be the number one reason also, is you don't want your data on the system drive if something goes wrong with windows. If you have to repair the system drive your data can be safely out of the way on drive 2.

The easiest way to do this is to assign a new location to any of your windows data folders. These folders are known as My documents, My Pictures, My favorites in XP, and Documents, Pictures, and Favorites in vista.

Assigning a new location to the documents folder is easy and the same thing works for any data folder:

In XP, the default location for My Documents is c:\Documents and Settings\username\My DocumentsDefault location in vista c:\users\username\Documents. To see this just go to the My Documents folder on the start menu and right click on the My Documents short cut, (Documents in Vista).

Find the Locations tab in the property sheet. Assign the new location and click move. A dialog confirming the move will pop up.

Some things to keep in mind:
The most useful reason for doing this is freeing up space on the system root drive. This is not a backup it is a move of the files to a new location. But the nice thing is the My Documents link still works just like before.There is some performance gained by giving windows more room to work with on the system root drive.

The gains will be minimized if the new drive is only a logical volume and not another physical disk. The problem is if something happens to the windows install and it no longer can be booted files in logical partitions may not be recoverable even if the drive is later installed as a slave.
So put the documents on a seperate physical drive to get the most out this simple change.