How to Change The Default Location For Installing Applications

When you install a certain software or game it normally installs them to the default location of installed programs which is C:\Program Files. Most application installer gives you the option to change the location where you will place the software, but some applications don’t give you the luxury to do that.

You may want to change the program installer location if you have several partitions or hard drive and want to put all the installed programs on another disk while leaving the primary disk with only windows files installed. This is also useful for computer shop/Internet cafe owners and most of them of them specially here in our place use this trick. They place all the PC games on another partition then freezes the primary disk to protect the windows system files from being damaged any viruses.

Here is a simple guide on how you can change the default location for installing applications. This trick involves registry editing so I highly suggest that you make a backup first on your registry before proceeding with this guide.

1. Run your registry editor by going into Start –> Run –> type regedit

2. Browse to the following keys

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion

3. On the right hand pane Look for the value named ProgramFilesDir. It’s default value is c:\Program Files. Change it to your preferred location. ex. d:\Games or d:\Programs.

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