Vista program organization?

[walkman]

Because I experiment with a lot of software, on my XP system I installed my base set of applications on the C: drive and then installed most other programs in e:\program files\ and e:\util\ .The idea was that I kept my c: drive fairly clean so it would be easier to do a partition backup and restore in case I wanted to rebuild windows.

Does that make any sense with a new build using Vista 64?

Any other suggestions on how to organize programs/data/media on a Vista machine?

 

[DeaconFrost]

I'd leave them alone as the are by default, to the C:\Program Files or C:\Program Files (x86) directories. The files in there are easy to remove and clean up. The registry entries left behind are the part that needs cleaning up, and that is true no matter where you install the apps. Simply installing them to a data drive doesn't save you much.

If you truly want to play around with a lot of software, run XP in a VM. That way, if you build your clean image, all you have to do is make a copy of that VM file. When you want to restore to a clean state, just overwrite the VM file with your "good, clean" one.

 

[nessus]

Or use a VM with a differencing file. When done with your current round of tests, discard the changes in the differencing file. Don't even mess with your base image file.