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I recently begun to clean up and organize files on my desktop. It’s been about a year since I built it<\/a>, so as you can image, there were files and documents scattered all over the HDD in various unorganized and cryptically-named folders. This chaotic mess of files was making it hard to find anything, even with search, so something had to be done. I endeavored to organize everything into the “My Documents” folder for easy access from a variety of programs, and then remembered why I’d stayed out of it in the first place – all the clutter that’s already there. What spawned this attempt at organization was my recent purchase of an additional 500 GB HDD. Not wanting it to fall into disorganization like the primary one, I decided I’d bring order from the start. Since I intended to use “My Documents” as a root for all of my stuff, I moved it<\/a> off my Windows partition<\/a> to the secondary HDD, so that it grow in size and not fill up my primary HDD. While the technical benefits from this might be mute, it does make things easier when you store all of your personal data on a separate drive or partition than your Windows one – if you ever need to reformat or reinstall, wiping the Windows partition won’t affect the partition your data is on.<\/p>\n It was at this point that I noticed all the stuff that was already in My Documents, the reason that I never really used in the first place – it’s already too cluttered. Most games will put their save game files in “My Documents”, and while I’m not opposed to this (it makes backing up and finding your saved games easier), I don’t like how they’re stored there. Most games simply create a folder in the root of “My Documents”, so if you have a lot of games installed, your folder will already be cluttered. It would be much better if all them adhered to some sort of convention – for example, putting them in sub folder called “My Game Saves” or something similar. Strangely, some of them attempt to do so, such as Age of Empires 3, TES IV: Oblivion and Civilization 4, which put their save games in the “My Games” sub folder. But, it’s not consistent, even with the same publisher – for example, Flight Simulator X doesn’t follow the same convention as Age of Empires 3. (I realize I could probably move all the save games to their own sub folder and edit some games’ configuration files to reflect this, but it’d be a major PITA.)<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\nPreamble<\/h3>\n
Running into trouble<\/h3>\n
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