title: Making Windows less juvenile link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/making-windows-less-juvenile/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 228 created: 2009/10/16 17:36:35 created_gmt: 2009/10/16 17:36:35 comment_status: open post_name: making-windows-less-juvenile status: publish post_type: post

Making Windows less juvenile

If there’s anything more juvenile that the “My Documents” folder in Windows XP, I’m not sure what it is. Interestingly, starting with Windows Vista it gets renamed to the more mature “Documents”. At the same time the user’s profile path (a/k/a %USERPROFILE%) gets relocated from the cumbersome “Documents and Settings” folder to C:USERS in Vista.

Why these seemingly insignificant changes? Well, mainly because the stark truth is that over 10 years since Microsoft introduced long file names, and their bastard cousins, folders with long file names, there are still problems getting many programs to work with them. Both JEdit and Apache Directory Studio, two cross-platform Java programs I spend an awful lot of time in both on Linux and Windows, have this problem. That, and “My” anything is just so… 90’s.

So what’s a former desktop engineer to do? Hit the Windows Registry, of course!

Before firing up regedit it’s a good idea to copy your entire user profile directory over to the new location. For me that was something like “C:Usersmytestuser”. You’ll need to do this as an admin user other that your own, since it will otherwise refuse to copy NTUSER.DAT, because it’s in use.

As it turns out, moving from “C:Documents and Settingsmytestuser” to “C:Usersmytestuser” only requires changing a single Registry setting:

HKLMSoftwareMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionProfileListSID-OF-YOUR-PROFILEProfileImagePath

In my example, the data changed to “%SystemDrive%Usersmytestuser”.

Changing “My Documents” to the more grownup-sounding “Documents” is also a matter of some registry magic. First thing to do is create the new folder, “C:UsersmytestuserDocuments” and copy everything under “My Documents” into it. Then, logged in as your user, open up and edit the following key:

HKCUSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerShell Folders

The values you want to hit are “Personal” and any of the “My” settings (e.g. “My Pictures”). All you do there is change the data to match whatever you want the new paths to be. “Personal”, for example, would change to something like “C:UsermytestuserDocuments”.

Once you’ve done that, there’s one final step to take. Right click on your desktop “My Documents” folder and change the target to the new name and path (if you answer “yes” to the prompt “Copy all files…”, you’ll wind up with a bunch of duplicate files and folders named “Copy of…”).

Because programs, including Microsoft’s, are supposed to use the official Windows environment variables in all paths everything should work. Don’t be surprised, however, if you come across something that’s got the original paths and folder names hardcoded somewhere (e.g. the Resource Kit’s command prompt link).

Copyright 2004-2019 Phil Lembo