Like Michael, who stores some of his tools in D:\U

http://www.ztw3.com/forum/forum_entry.php?id=45562

I've been using C:\1 since XTreeGold DOS days to hold stuff that I care about. Both C:\1\ZTW and C:\1\XTG live there. The reasons are historic, but I still see the following advantages:

1. Hitting 1 in DW when on drive C: will position me immediately on C:\1 -- unlike Michael, who needs to press SHIFT_u (or \,ALT_U?) to reach his directory :-).

2. Using numerical dir names gives you 10 free and fast DW shortcuts, since you don't need to press SHIFT or waste an entry in Treespec history! You may want to create your own convention and have \0...\9 dirs created systematically on certain disks that you need to manage. It's up to you to come up with something useful...

3. Backing up and restoring my environment is simple, since everything I care about is in C:\1... Stuff in C:\Program Files\... is considered worthless, unmanageable junk, like the rest of the platform and its crown-jewel, the Registry. In a damaged, corrupted or infected OS situation (a certainity), I know I can get back to work fast by restoring my C:\1 tree (about 200MB).

4. True, some of the tools I need insist on being "installed", ie, potentially lost, so I'm always looking for things that are MS-free and easy manage and plug into F9.

5. My editor, NoteTab Light, seems to work OK without installation. It's possible that I may be losing some file associations, but so far I had no problems when simply restoring my C:\1 tree to somebody's PC.

6. I also need to take care of my profile, so I have a command that copies the Favorites, SendTo, and a few other folders where I invested some time and don't want to risk losing. I take these along with my C:\1 tree on a CD-ROM.

Hope this helps somebody...