Building a Graphics Workstation: Installing and Tweaking Windows XP
June 17, 2008
Moving My Documents Folder
Operating system and data have different requirements on hardware and storage. To set up the workstation and to be able to back up your system efficiently you need to separate OS from data.
There are several ways how can you do that. Majority of user's data are stored in My Documents folder. You can place OS and My Documents on separate partitions on the same hard drive, or you can place them on separate hard drives. There are benefits and drawbacks to both options: need for multiple hard drives, ability to dedicate high performance/ low capacity hard drive to the operating system etc.
Typically after default installation Windows XP OS is located on drive C: on the first partition. You will need another partition or another hard drive to move My Documents folder to. The best time to do this is immediately after the initial installation of your operating system, before you copy your data from the old hard drive. If you have only one hard drive with a single partition on it, you will need to get another drive to do this. Generally you will need to erase partition (and loose all data on that partition) before you can adjust partition size. There are several partition management utilities which offer to do this without loss of the data, but I suggest that you backup your data first to another hard drive before you attempt to change anything :-)
Once you decided where you want to move 'My Documents' folder to, make sure you have enough free space at destination. To check the total size of the My Documents folder, go to 'Start' --> right click on 'My Documents' (or 'Start' --> 'My Computer' --> right click on 'My Documents') and select 'Properties'. Similar window should appear:
If you click on 'Find Target', 'My Documents' folder will open in a new window showing its current location. There you can simply right click --> properties and check the size on the disk.
Once you verified that you have enough free space at destination, click on 'Move' tab in the window showed above and navigate to that destination. If needed create a new folder 'My Documents' at the destination. Then click OK and confirm 'move' and the entire folder will be moved to new location. The system shortcut for this folder will be adjusted accordingly. For more information you can read Microsoft article.
If you have more users on your computer, you will need to move "their documents" folders as well. Similarly, after Windows XP SP2 and later allows you to move 'My Pictures' folder in a similar fashion and all applications should be able to find its new location.
Moving Other Data
Almost all graphic applications use some sort of a temporary folder or a cache. These usually contain many small or large files, and can grow to tens of GBs over time. Again by default they are located somewhere within the default Windows XP OS installation. Examples are Photoshop, Bridge, Dreamweaver, Lightroom, Capture One, PTGUi etc. You will need to open each of these applications, navigate to 'Options', 'Preferences' or 'Settings' and change the location of the temporary folder/ cache. I usually create 'Temp' partition or use a separate hard drive for this purpose. From all these temporary folders/ caches only Lightroom catalog will need to be backed up on a regular basis, and Lightroom will take care of it automatially (if set up properly).
Once you move all these data away from OS, do 'Disc Cleanup' and defragment partition where OS is installed. That should leave you with 'clean and slim' OS installation, which should not significantly change in size over the years, and should be easy to defragment and back up.