Installer or portable?

Yeah its just a priority system to where they get placed.

C: or what ever your main windows partition is, that whole drive should be just for windows. You can place or install stuff here if you want but overall it should be kept pretty minute.
The only time i install stuff here is if that application does not allow the user to change install path, In that case i might even consider symlink that application to another location especially if it takes up lots of space.

D: Will have your most used apps installed and portable.

USB or any other drive for everything else. Not installing only portable on USB, well you can install there if you want but its better rationale not to.

its just for performance reasons, computers are pretty good at multi tasking these days but still its good practice because it means that there is less chance of your main drive getting bogged down and preventing a compounding effect on performance.

You think of Windows being a control center so you aid it along with these methods so that it can run efficiently. You don't want lots of apps installed and running on that main drive because they are all competing for I/O and can mean that its a potential bottleneck for the OS, you need to be doing a lot of multitasking but still avoidance is the best practice because it means you are minimizing the factor outright.

The user folder is one area that is a problem on the main partition and its a compounding issue when we are talking about this stuff because it get insanely large and annoying to manage over time, it effect performance because everything wants to cache there and store data and read and write from this root tree. Its also another area to move to another drive but its more involved.

Also you don't need to get stuck in it and over think it, like you don't need portable for everything, i still install stuff the standard way, like my web browser is installed and various other apps are installed but i also use a lot of portable ones too it really just dpends on what you want or what functionality sometimes you may get less or more functionality to an app depending on how you run it.

Example something like Java i don't have installed for security reasons because it means its not an system wide environment variable which is a security concern, if i run apps that require java runtime i do so by using complied binary runtimes. Which means that the app can run but the java functionality becomes localized to that app and not functionality that is exposed to the whole system.

if you employ this sort of methodology which many ppl do then user/appdata is the sole elephant left in the room and is counterproductive to this system. it means you need to move that folder away from the windows partition as well.

Its the second half of the windows registry, but its also used as a catch all location so it can be used for anything mainly data storage by apps but there is no rules you can do anything there that you would in any normal directory.

Microsoft guidelines for the registry are any key entry or value should be no larger than 2048 bytes this is to help maintain performance for the registry. The inverse of this is that the Appdata folder is the counter part to the registry so its where programs save data instead of saving it to the registry.

The outcome is it becomes an area of the computer that gets quite large it also is an area of the computer that receives a lot of I/O at times. This is all counter productive to the main drive and the directory should be moved away. Its also a directory that requires a lot of routine maintenance.

x509 said:

I use some portable utilities, but I am not sure of the best practices in installing tham. That is, do you install them in the \Programs folder? Is it Ok to install 32 bit portable programs in \Programs? Or do you install them, in some different top-level folder?

I put all mine in C:\Portable Apps (its a good name to use because alphabetically it's right next to Program Files). When I build a new PC with a clean install I just copy my Portable Apps folder to it.

Malneb said:

C:\ should be minimized imo, if you have other drives then apps get installed or placed there instead. There is three main reason to do so.

- minimizing space used
- minimizing I/O saturation to that drive
- minimizing reads and writes

Are you saying that people should have their installed programs installed on a D drive, so that C is only windows?

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Malneb said:

Yeah its just a priority system to where they get placed.

C: or what ever your main windows partition is, that whole drive should be just for windows. You can place or install stuff here if you want but overall it should be kept pretty minute.
The only time i install stuff here is if that application does not allow the user to change install path, In that case i might even consider symlink that application to another location especially if it takes up lots of space.

D: Will have your most used apps installed and portable.

USB or any other drive for everything else. Not installing only portable on USB, well you can install there if you want but its better rationale not to.

its just for performance reasons, computers are pretty good at multi tasking these days but still its good practice because it means that there is less chance of your main drive getting bogged down and preventing a compounding effect on performance.

You think of Windows being a control center so you aid it along with these methods so that it can run efficiently. You don't want lots of apps installed and running on that main drive because they are all competing for I/O and can mean that its a potential bottleneck for the OS, you need to be doing a lot of multitasking but still avoidance is the best practice because it means you are minimizing the factor outright.

The user folder is one area that is a problem on the main partition and its a compounding issue when we are talking about this stuff because it get insanely large and annoying to manage over time, it effect performance because everything wants to cache there and store data and read and write from this root tree. Its also another area to move to another drive but its more involved.

I'm not try to be difficult and I'm NOT TROLLING. I'm trying to explain why I install progams on the C drive.

I have one NVMe drive in my system and my C-windows and programs and D-DATA are both on that NVMe drive. My E-MEDIA drive is on spinning rust because I have over 3 TB of music, PDF books and all my photo files. I shoot RAW, so each photo costs me 25 MB. And my files will now increase to 60 MB each, since I just upgraded my camera body. No way could I justify an NVMe or SSD drive for all those files.

So if I put all my program installs on C or on a separate D drive just for programs, either way all I/O is going to that one NVMe drive. And for performance reasons, I don't want to put progam installs on a realtively slow SATA SSD.

x509 said:

Are you saying that people should have their installed programs installed on a D drive, so that C is only windows?

Yes.

x509 said:

I'm not try to be difficult and I'm NOT TROLLING. I'm trying to explain why I install progams on the C drive.

I have one NVMe drive in my system and my C-windows and programs and D-DATA are both on that NVMe drive. My E-MEDIA drive is on spinning rust because I have over 3 TB of music, PDF books and all my photo files. I shoot RAW, so each photo costs me 25 MB. And my files will now increase to 60 MB each, since I just upgraded my camera body. No way could I justify an NVMe or SSD drive for all those files.

So if I put all my program installs on C or on a separate D drive just for programs, either way all I/O is going to that one NVMe drive. And for performance reasons, I don't want to put progam installs on a realtively slow SATA SSD.

There is no real rhyme or reason you are free to provision how you see fit, Windows is designed for ease of use so everything is designed to go on the windows partition and function. The user might only have one drive for example.

Past that the idea is that the main boot drive that contains the windows partition should be kept to a more scrutinized standard than the rest of the drives because its the brains of the entire OS the whole system is counting on that one drive. By utilizing some of the methods explained you maximize efficiency.

if i was to put all my software and games an everything on c then that is a lot of overhead not just for space reasons but for performance if i run like 20 things at once then that main drive is going to being a potential choke point. it becomes a positive feedback loop and therefore it diminishes in performance.

Once the OS gets slow then everything else will get slow, so the point is avoidance is that measure taken to avoid that happening. Today its not as crucial as it used to be but its still something that is good practice. I try to do a lot of stuff on platter drives and sata 3 drives because NVME is not always going to net you much difference. Reserve that NVME speed for the OS. There is no reason why you can't have pcie nvme drives either which is where all your games would go.

Even there not all games need nvme speeds you can tell in a few easy ways if your computer never ramps up you can chuck that game on a slow drive. I usually just look at afterburner combined with disk i/o if the oc never kicks on while that games playing then that game is not requiring peak performance.
You still have to account for longevity of nand based drives so i try to do as little as possible on them so they last the longest, and only reserve those drives for the stuff that needs speed.

I am not saying that you have to do it like this because you have choice but these are the sorts of things we think about when min maxing the computer.

x509 said:

Do you archive downloaded software on your C: drive? Me, I use a different drive, which I back up only weekly, not daily. But I like the idea that all programs I use are on Drive C:

No - I store downloaded software in D:/Downloads. I use drive C for Windows and installed programs except for large installations like games which I keep on a separate drive on my desktop PC. I like to keep drive C: a small size so I can do frequent system backups using Reflect without taking up too much storage space.

The only real issue I've seen years back is some programs insist on installing only on the same drive as Windows, that the V irtual Memory is active and that there is a Temp folder available. I've had success in putting large programs on a second drive. I also use apps that can be portable but they are on a USB Thumb drive, a couple of old ones are from late '90s such as Claris Works and DeltaCad 4, newer ones such as LibreOffice and VLC that have portable versions and some diagnostics I use that I don't want to leave on a clients' computer.
PortableApps.com - Portable software for USB, portable, and cloud drives

@Maldeb and @steveC

thanks for your comments. I'm not a game player but I do a lot with photo editing. Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom (plus lots of plug-ins), Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera RAW. Plus a scanner software (Silverfast), and various other photo-related programs. And of course, Microsoft Office. Office 365 doesn't give you any install options. It just installs the whole shebang.

In all my C drive has 128GB of files, out of a partition size of 256 GB.

The Lightroom catalog (and all my other data) is on drive D. My photo files (and music, etc, etc) is on Drive E, which is a spinner.