Is there a benifit in doing it this way? I understand having more room for all the data but splitting up the drives, one for render, one for capture??? Just trying to understand the logic behind this. Thanks again.

Hard drives have one needle that magnetically changes the charge on the surface of the platter. This makes the ones and zeros that binary uses to make sense of the data we store. So, just imaging a 72000rpm drive spinning and one needle jumping back and forth across the drive reading and writing to it. Now, imagine you are rendering to that drive from footage that has been captured on that drive while consulting a file that tells the program what to write and where to write it and all this going on on the same drive. You are going to lose some speed in that process. How much? I am not sure but if you divy up your drives as stated above, the hard drives do not have to work as hard and whatever the lag time is the other way will not be experienced this way.

j razz

Excellent explanation jrazz. Thank you. So let me ask this: If i am renedering a video on Drive G and i am working on a project on DriveF at the same time, i should not have latency on my PC? Doesn't renedering utilize much of the processor?

John,
Is it TweakUI from Power Toys that lets you move those folders??
Thanks,
Tom

No. You will still experience latency. Your motherboard is kind of like a highway upon which all the data travels. There can be bottlenecks and traffic jams etc. So, yes rendering does utilize a vast portion of the CPU but if you seperate the drives, the information it is calling for is coming in on different highways. If it is tied up doing rendering you are going to have lag times b/c the CPU is like trying to get through downtown during rush hour.

j razz

Tom,

Yes, it's TweakUI, under "My Computer" > "Special Folders."

Of course, to move the Internet Explorer cache, you do that from within IE.

John

You can move your "my documents" folder withoutr any need for TweakUI. Simply right-click "my documents" and in properties, there should be a tab that allows you to specify location. Choose the new drive, and it will nicely offer to move everything and update all links accordingly.

So is there any way to completely get rid of the whole "My Documents" thing and have Windows entirely forget that the concept even existed?

Chien-

I don't think you can get rid of it, although you could just ignore it & manually put your stuff wherever you want. That's a lot to overcome, though, and I don't understand the benefit to going old school. Pretty much every program written in the last ten years defaults to saving data in your My Documents folder location, so it conveniently brings you to a fixed location. I recognized that this folder would get trashed very quickly, so I have sub-folders for things that work for me ("Word files," "Excel files," "Downloads," etc.). I generally separate my data on a different hard drive, and the My Documents function makes this easy. All of my data is in one location, except for Captures & Renders, but I can set those default locations from within Vegas, so I'm good. I'm not sure why you'd want to fight the OS on this, and I'm an old school guy throwing back to DOS (heck, actually the Apple II).

Brian

Oh, i pretty much ignore it already anyway. I have directories in specific places for specific uses and i'll save stuff where i want it. My objection is software that *always* goes back to "My Documents" every time you Open or Save, even if i just changed the path to the directory i want a few moments ago.

And yes, my roots go back to Apple //, TRS-80, and PDP-11 too. Now those were fun days!

Is there a reason why you would want to get rid of the My Documents folder?

It's annoying. I want to organize my files in locations that make sense to me. I've had a filing system that i've used for 20+ years and i like it much better than the My Documents tree.

I also hate having my files so far down in a tree like C:\Documents and Settings\Chien\My Documents\letters ... it's just too long and tortuous especially when using legacy software that doesn't know about users and My Documents.

Chien-

If you have more than more drive or partition, you can move the My Documents to there, which will vastly shorten the tree for you (i.e. D:\My Documents\letters ...). Of course, you could also just move it to the root level of your C: drive and achieve the same thing. Yes, the My Documents is a pain with the legacy software, especially since you probably have the weird DOS 8 character abbreviation that you have to type.

Of course, if it gets to be too much you can always pull out the old cassette tape drive that served as storage for those old Trash 80s & Apple IIs. I was fortunate to be able to pick up a used Apple II with a floppy drive, so big stuff!

Windows bases all it's settings on the
User environment variables, profiles.
System environment variables.

Windows XP:
You can see some of these settings from a command prompt.
Start -> Run "Type in" cmd
This opens up a command window.
Type in SET <enter>
The screen displayed lists many of your windows settings, which are actually user and system environment variables, similar to alias names.

An example of this is simply open up any explorer window (My Computer)
In the location window type in %TEMP% and then hit the Enter Key.
You will be taken to your Users temporary directory location, this is a users environment variable.

You can customize these user settings under the user environment variables (Properties of "My Computer")

I could not afree with you more on this statement. I don't like doing this either and now understand your answer completely.

> i pretty much ignore it already anyway.

I felt that way a while back, but in the last few years I've learned to use its advantages. Since most apps store stuff there by default, there's a little less thinking I need to do, and also when switching or reinstalling the OS, copying over the My Docs folder tree is 95% of the work I need to do.

And since having a 300GB root drive is no big deal anymore, there's hardly a reason IMO to have My Docs on another drive.

On the other edge of this topic.... I used to format my media drives (where AVI and such captures are stored) using NTFS with a non-default Allocation Unit Size = 64k (largest option) since few if any files on those drives would be small. I thought it would speed access and keep the FAT as succinct as possible. Anybody else do that or know differently?

I also use that feature when computers and drives were slower, now I don't really notice any difference.
The one thing I did come across when using a high setting like 64k on my drive when I wanted to compress a folder on that ntfs partition I couldn't because of the 64k sector size.
I don't use that feature anymore.

"And since having a 300GB root drive is no big deal anymore, there's hardly a reason IMO to have My Docs on another drive."
=========================================================
I have "my Documents" on another drive (D drive), and I do this mainly for backup purposes. I don't use system restore (it's not the most reliable way of backingup/restoring).

I have all of my apps on C drive along with the OS of course, and I do a disk image of C once a month or so, or when ever I add a program. At anytime I can restore the image without having to worry about recently accumulated documents. Even my email folder is on D drive. so that any time I restore an image, I don't lose my mail.

I find that this is truly the best way of doing things. Even system restore leaves stuff behind in the registry and enough restoring, adding/removing software...etc and your registry plugs up and slows things down, eventually leading to a reinstall of everything. Disk imaging covers all the bases and leaves you with a nice clean system upon every restore. Having the personal data on a different drive makes the whole thing a snap.

I should point out that I also have dual boot XP/Vista.... having "my Documents on D drive allows me to easily share the folder with both OS's so all is the same... even the mail.