How should you organize your hard drive or system of drives? First, be aware the default settings that most programs use are really bad. I am almost convinced the programmers tested these to see which ones can drive a person insane faster or cause a machine to crash more often, and that's what they chose! An example is the whacky way these turkeys have with the Start menu. Ugh!

Here's my Start menu. To keep you from having to wait a week to download the image, I chopped it and shrunk it. You have to squint, but the information is there.

Notice I got rid of the MS-Office crap, set up a "key programs" folder for the stuff I use the most, and a folder for "housekeeping." Do you see how intuitive this is? I labeled (more or less) each menu folder by the type of function I want to do . This computer is loaded with tons of programs, and I'm not about to try to remember all their names. If I want to communicate, I open that folder and find a bunch of browsers, fax utilities, etc. I also copy shortcuts to multiple places, so I don't have to try to remember which place has which shortcut. Let's move on down past this, and I'll show you hard drive organization.

Here, you'll see my C:drive has programs, only. Some of these have a real grudge against you if you don't allow them to locate in a default directory. FrontPage, for example, insists on having a Front Page Webs folder. So I have it there, but all my webs go on E:drive. I name them e:\webxxxx, e:\webyyyy, e:\webzzzz, and so on. I keep the names to 8 characters or less, because when you go beyond 8 characters, computer resources required to process the name increase dramatically.

On D drive, my folders are 00 (at the top of the list, this way--these are the files I access most often), 0download, 0profiles (I moved all of Windows profiles information here, and shortened the path names considerably. So, if C ever fails, I won't have to rebuild my desktop, preferences, etc. You can back your 0profiles folder to some sequentially-numbered floppies or a removable drive, if you want. I use a tape backup.), 1CompanyX (a client-- name isn't really CompanyX), 1CompanyY (you know the drill), Archives (old stuff I just can't bring myself to nuke), Images and videos (I broke the filename length rule, so sue me), OrganizationX, OrganizationY (deja vu--it's that company thing again!), templates (I refuse to leave my templates where I cannot easily get to them and back them up), utl (utilities), and--here's that lovin' feeling again--webX and webY. Actually, I have more than two companies and two organizations, but you get the idea. I do have only two websites, there. These are personal websites, and I keep them separate from the rest of my websites.

I do so many websites, that I have a whole drive devoted to them. That is drive E, but you're not surprised, I'll bet. For the websites, I put all of my authoring software (except FrontPage--it really has this thing for C drive) and web utilities there. Plus, all my files. This violates the programs on one drive, files on the other rule, but I just wanted to be able to back all of my website stuff (excluding Frontpage) onto a single tape backup. And nothing but website stuff is on this drive.

Drive F is for temp files. This way, I don't have as much file fragmentation. Nor will my drive just fill up. I  can delete the whole contents of Drive F without batting an eye.

Drive G is for my pagefile. Nothing else goes on this drive.