BinaryPhysics

In the past, I always made sure that during program installation, that it doesn't install it to the C:\Program Files, but rather the drive of my own choice.  It's a tedious process as you have to keep doing this for every program you install, but in the end it's not so bad.

Yeah, this is the other reason. I'm hoping that a lot of programs installing using the %ProgramFiles% macro. If I change that in the registry then it'd make life just generally easier.

How does Windows react to the "Common" folder being moved?

My head. Designed most of a system of a program that works out StarCraft II build orders when I woke up yesterday.

Apart from that I have my laptop that I specifically got with a smaller screen. It's only 14" so I can take it most places.

Sorry for the double post but I wanted to make this bit clear (I'm not amazing at explaining myself): I was just wondering how Windows behaved during updates, etc.

If you dedicate a single drive only to Window's folder (which takes around 10Gb for Win7), you'd be wasting a lot of space (30Gb+).

 

Still, I'm not sure if you can do that. I know you can change the User folder location, but NTFS doesn't supports hardlinks among different drives, and I don't think you could fix that with softlinks only. Not counting bricking the install in the middle of course.

My current Windows folder (that's just the system folder) is 30 GB. I wanted to leave room for updates and the like.

It's possible via a change of the registry value that changes the default location and then a ROBOCOPY via a install disk and then apparently a junction to the new location just in case. That's done after the installation finishes.

What programs are you planning to install?

Visual Studio 2010/2012's toolset, Starcraft, Steam, nothing really fancy. These aren't _that_ big in themselves its just that with them and Windows fighting for space It's unlikely that I'd have the room.

Most installers offer you a choice of where to install them, merely defaulting to ":/Program Files/". It doesn't harm software to be installed outside of Program Files (unless they were poorly made).

I know. . This is really a curiosity for usability. Really if it came down to it I could just make "fake" folders on the separate drive.

Added benefit of wiping Windows and leaving all my files intact.

Just get a larger SSD, the very large ones are expensive but 80GB should cover most of your program installing need.

I regularly fill the 256GB of my current drive so those sizes aren't really up to my requirement. :/. I figured I could just get a cheaper HDD and upgrade when I have the money later.

Have you tried symbolic links?  I moved my Program Files directories off of my 32GB SSD successfully using them. 

 
Edit: Using robocopy and the Windows 7 Repair command prompt*

That was exactly my plan. . I was just wondering how Windows behaved during updates, etc. All I could find on Microsoft forms was the _advice_ not to do it. _advice_ is nice but it's not really an explanation. .

Are you suggested effectively storing entities and components in giant string tables?

I'd have thought that Systems would be better placed to be isolated functions in this case and you just call them all in the game loop.