Choosing which drive on which to load an application

[Neillb]

Can anyone please tell me if if there is any utility, or simple way, to direct a download to install an application on a drive other than C?

With SSDs, it can be helpful to keep the boot drive uncluttered by putting less used, or bulky applications, on another drive. However, increasingly applications - such as Google Chrome and Opera - no longer ask you which drive you want to install the application on. They sometimes let you download the link to the download on a drive of your choice, but then force the installation on to drive C.

Thanks!

 

[getochkn]

Not easily, but you could do something with this.

http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/linkshellextension.html

Basically, it takes advantage of NTFS functions and allows you to make the OS think a folder on a different drive is a folder, and the OS, etc, has no idea that it is, so registry, copying, updates, all think it's the "c" drive even though it resides on the "d" or whatever drive.

You would copy your programfiles\chrome folder to your storage drive somewhere, right click on it, select pick link source, then goto the c drive, delete the folder, right click, say drop link, choose junction, and from there on, c:\program files\chrome, for all purposes with copying, updating, etc, will all act like everything is on c, but actually do all the files on d.

I use it for my media server. I've added more HD's over time, and I want to share 1 folder on my network, that has TV, movie, Music, etc folder in it, and not have people have to access like 4 different network shares, so my "media" folder has a movies junction from 1 drive, a tv junction from another drive, etc and people can copy to that share and everything goes where it should.

 

[USAFRet]

Most applications are actually comparitively small.
My main drive is a 120GB SSD. Holds the OS and all applications apart from games. ~75GB used, and I can probably trim that down some.

But just about all applications will give you the option of 'where'. Don't accept the defaults.

 

[Neillb]

Thank you getochkn and USAFRet: I've listened, and re-thought, and now have my SSD under control.