How to Change Default Windows Installation Path to Your Desired Path

If your windows OS is installed in C drive, whenever installing new applications, the default suggested installation path is C:\Program Files. If you don’t like to install new applications in the default path for example install in D:\Softwares, instead of changing the path manually each time, you could actually do the simple registry hack to change the default installation path to the one as per desired.

To change the default installation path, just follow below steps:

1. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion.

2. At the right panel, look for ProgramFilesDir.

3. Double click on it to change the value to your desired path. For example, change the value from C:\Program Files to D:\Softwares.

programfilesdir

4. Click OK to save the setting.

Once above steps are completed, the default installation path has been changed to your desired path whenever you install any new applications. Hope this simple tips can help you to work more effectively by simplifying the routine process of installation.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 at 11:24 pm and is filed under Tips & Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “How to Change Default Windows Installation Path to Your Desired Path”

Swain
August 7th, 2009 02:56
3

Can you use a multi-item value in ProgramFilesPath like:
%ProgramFiles%,C:\Program Files
to give programs two places to look for files?
In any case, it seems that one might have to adjust any KEY that had “C:\Program Files” in it to start. Such as the “CommonFilesDir” KEY.
McHep
March 25th, 2009 01:22
2

You should not do this registry-hack after installing windows or after some applications were installed using the original path

Reason: if some programs writes REG_EXPAND_SZ-Values and were installed in the old directory and then read the registry-value they get the new directory. Even if this prog was installed in a different directory!
missingxtension
March 24th, 2009 23:08
1

This might be helpfull if you could nlite it, but after the fact is not that helpfull.

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