Vista 64... Installing games/apps

UTmaniac

UTmaniac

UTmaniac

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Having installed Vista Home Premium 64 for the first time over the last couple of days, I would appreciate some advice from those of you that dived in early into the merky waters of a brand new operating system before me...

I've discovered that Vista, by default, will try and install new games or applications into two distinctive root folders ("program files" or "program files x86").

As I perhaps mistakenly set up the Vista partition with just 20GB of the current HDD's 80GB size, I have started to install games in a seperate partition, still labelled "program files x86."

Should I be letting Vista use its default folders in the OS partition and therefore increase the size of this Vista partition?
 
Hey UTmaniac, it won't make a difference or even matter where you install your applications. I believe the reason for the "program files" and "program files x86" folders is purely for organization purposes. :)
 
I personally put all my stuff into a specific place. Always have done, it might not be necessary for Windows itself, but it sure helps me out.

The 2 program folders are only there for us to know that the PC is putting 32bit and 64bit programs into their own folders... TBH it makes no difference at all where they go!

In fact, I put all my stuff, whether its 32 or 64 Bit, into D:\Program Filesz and the ones I dont, are system stuff or utilities etc, like Nero or AntiVirus/Spyware etc... These go into C:\Program Files\ as normal, or C:\Program Files (x86)\.

Games etc, I always put in D:\Games\gamename Again, its something I have always done, and I will always do.

My Media is in E:\ and only my Drive F: is a mixture of tat that does not go anywhere else...

My M: Drive is my Downloads, my T: is ISO Images

I have, at this time, ( hang on I will check... ) Ok... Well... I have 239,735 Music Files, consisting of MIDI, MP3, WAV and AVR Format ( Mostly samples for my Atari ) , 772,194 Pictures, 103,585 Font Files, 198 AVI Files, and 40,956 Various format Film clips, and guess what?

No matter what I am looking for, I will know exactly where every file I have is...

I dont need no BS search or indexing crap on my PC... I use what we in *** business call "Common Sense".

For example, Im listening to a Helloween song right now, its in the WinAmp list and I just dumped everything into that, and I can tell you OTTOMH that the song is

E:\MP3\Helloween\Keeper of the Seven Keys Part II\10-Save Us.mp3

Hang on...

Ok, I was wrong, its a space then a dash then a space in the Track name, but there you go.

Its the same for all my Media Files.

Games are no different.

D:\Games\Quake 4\
D:\Games\Call Of Duty 4\

Only difference there is that all my Steam stuff is held all in D:\Games\Steam

Like I said its really for my own benefit rather than the computers, but it all adds up to a very clean setup and it helps me to know exactly where everything is.
 
I only have two partitions. C:\ for my system and D:\ for games and downloads and an image of my C:\ drive.

Completley logical to me!


M.
 
Thats cool.

I know many people who only have one drive and say thats completely logical to them too.

Thats great.

For me, I just like to know that all my media is here and all my games are there and all my utils are here and so on.

Plus, I sometimes need to let the missus watch a Movie on the TV so, I send a movie while Im tryign to play Crysis / UT3 / whatever and I still also need to defrag my drives at the same time, so, with doing other things too, I need to have more than just 2 drives.

Plus of course downloading 24/7 also means that takes up a drive all to itself, so downloading while at the same time, I try to load a game, the game gets slowed down a little... If I was to also be sending out a movie and defragging the drive at the same time, then I would be suffering badly. This is something I dont have.
 
Thanks for the replies people! I suspected all would be well, but I just wanted to get reassurance that Vista 64 did not apply some sort of compatibility mode to the "program files x86" folder in the OS partition ;)
 
It's actually interesting if you look at the shares.

Older programs use the documents and settings to put shortcuts to the all users. In Vista it's now Users but there is a shortcut which states that documents and settings is now users.

Boring but interesting none the less.


M.
 
What I cant get over, is that in the documents folder, there is links to the My Documents folder that you cant use, the Pictures that you cant use, but you can use the My pictures, and inside the my pictures there is links to My documents that you cant use but the Pictures folder you can... Erm, sort of?
 
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