All the programs you install on your computer take up a portion of space on your hard drive in Windows. This is a fact, and you should be very aware of the available space, otherwise you may have problems in the operation of your machine. You may have the possibility to add an additional internal hard drive to your computer, or you may have the possibility to add an external one, and whatever the case may be we are going to show you how to change the default Windows location for files.
Yes, you can choose the default location of files in Windows.
You may not have paid attention to where files are created on your computer.
This is normal, since Windows 10 and 11 take care of this task by going to the Documents folder.
The truth is that this is the folder where all generated files usually go unless you download them, in which case they will go to the folder with this name.
But all this can change if you are the one who decides to modify the default location in Windows. This is a simple trick that will help you improve the performance of your machine whenever possible as it depends on the following factors:
- Having two hard drives connected to your computer.
- Organize the secondary disk in folders.
These two points should be given in that order for such an obvious reason as the fact that you need an extra storage unit to start the organization process.
You can also partition the Windows hard disk if you have a lot of space on the main drive, for which we advise you to have at least 500GB or more to ensure the correct functioning of the operating system.
If this is the case, we recommend that 35% of the total space be dedicated to the operating system due to the large number of updates that you are sure to receive during its use.
How to change the installation path of programs in Windows 10
Let’s move on to the more practical part of this article where we will see how to change the installation path of programs in Windows 10.
To begin with, you have to take into account the points we talked about before as far as hardware is concerned.
Now we are going to tell you the steps to execute this trick that you can do very easily:
Create the new folder in the location of your choice.
- In that folder, right click and click on “Properties”.
- Go to “Location”.
- In this tab click on “Move”.
- In the new window indicate the location of the new folder.
- Apply the changes.
- Now click on “Apply”.
One of the things you can change is the type of files that can be supported, namely: general items, documents, music and video. Select the one that suits you best in this regard depending on the type of file.
In addition to this way, there is another way to get a change of the destination path of files in Windows 10. Everything is supported by the contents of the computer settings, so let’s start with this part:
- Go to “Settings.”
- Select “Storage.”
- Click on change location of new content.
- Select the type of file you want to move.
- Click on the drive.
From this point on, all files that are generated within the machine will have a new location to go to.
In addition, by generating the folder as we showed you in the previous steps there will be no loss and you will have each file separated in its corresponding space.
This will help you for an important reason and that is to separate the operating system part from the rest of the data. This way you will not saturate the same partition