I was referring to the C:\documents folder not the c:/documents and settings
folder. My reason for wanting to get rid of it was I have four documents
folders; C:\documents, C:\Documents & Settings\all users, C:\Documents &
Settings\me, and C:\Documents & Settings \wife seams a little redundant to
me? As I stated in original post I am new to XP. Help
me out here, how many and which documents folders should I have? Thank
you
Keep in mind that what Windows Explorer shows in My Documents for each user
are composite views. It also places access to this view in several places
within Explorer. These are not multiple folders/files, they are multiple
representations. Each view is the user's own personal documents and the
contents of shared documents. Putting aside these virtual views for now...
Default physical location for each user's document folders view is:
\Documents and Settings\<their account>\My Documents\
\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents
C:\Documents was likely user created or a leftover if this system was
upgraded from an older version of Windows.
If you don't want to use the "per user" structure provided by XP, you could
redirect each user's "My Documents" to a common folder such as
C:\Documents. To do this, log on to a user's account. Right click their My
Documents shortcut and select Properties. On the window that appears,
you'll see the Move button and Target location. Either use Move or type in
the desired location.
After "moving" and redirecting My Documents, there will still be a physical
Documents folder under the user's name in Documents and Settings. It's an
empty folder and a system folder so just ignore it rather than deleting it.
Also after doing this redirect, whenever you use the My Documents shortcut,
it will open the folder where everything has been redirected to. Especially
handy when you're using a program that defaults to saving in "My Documents"
as you won't have to redirect the dialog to your preferred documents folder
- Windows will do it for you instead.
Leave the Document folder all All Users alone. Don't use it if you don't
need/want it but leave it in place. Some program somewhere that you might
use someday may expect this default system folder to be there. Better to
have an empty/near empty folder laying around than to have that program
fail in some way because it can't find this expected object.
