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Change the Location of System Folders

By Mohammad Yousef | July 2004

Do you think it’s annoying that the locations of folders such as My Pictures, My Music… are preset? What if someone wants to change these locations to a different drive or partition? It’s pretty clear that the good folks at MS have overlooked this and forgot to include such an option leaving us, end-users, with only one solution: a registry hack (unless you have third party tweaking software).

Before I start, I must warn you that the registry is a crucial part of your system and messing around with it is dangerous. No, it can’t set off some nuclear reaction but improper use of it can severely damage your system. So, I only recommend registry hacks if you’re familiar with computers or at least able to carefully follow my instructions.

1. Open Registry Editor: Click Start | Click Run | Type regedit | Press Enter

2. Navigate to the following key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Explorer\User Shell Folders

3. You should find several expandable string values such as My Music, My Pictures, Favorites which contain the locations of different system folders.

Note that for the My Documents folder, the value is called "Personal" and not "My Documents". To change the location of a system folder, double-click the value representing it, change its value data to your new location and click OK.

You won’t be able to see the changes immediately, so you’ll need to either reboot or use my previous tip if you want to save some time.