Getting Rid of My Documents

by Ed Sawicki - President
Accelerated Learning Center
Tailored Computers

As my company replaces it's single-platform Microsoft applications (Office) with multi-platform applications (Star Office and ApplixWare), I've tried to simplify the environment for the users when they must run Windows. One annoying aspect of Windows 9X is the "My Documents" directory on drive C:. We don't use it since all important data is stored on the file server. I've tried to get rid of the directory numerous times but Windows protects it from being deleted claiming that it's a "system directory".

Today I won the battle and it was easy to do. I booted the machine with a Linux operating system that was on a diskette. I didn't want to actually install Linux on the machine so I used the diskette. I then mounted the DOS partition (the one that Windows calls drive C:) and removed the directory with the rmdir command. I then rebooted into Windows.

Windows didn't complain a bit at the absence of this "system directory". None of the Windows applications I use complained. I suspect that Microsoft Office would complain but I'm no longer using that beast. This makes life just a wee bit less complicated when using Windows.

If you decide to do this, do it on a test machine first, if possible, in case you run an application that gets really sick when it fails to see the directory. It's a good idea to make a backup copy of the Registry first. Then you'll be able to restore the directory using Linux again as well as restore the original Registry.