If you decide to forego the symbolic links path, and just want to move the bulk of your data to the hard drive, there is an easier way. For the following directories under your user, you can right click and change the location.
Contacts, Desktop, Downloads, Favorites, Links, My Documents, My Music, My Pictures, My Videos, Saved Games and Searches. This will move the bulk of your data in a very easy way (It will also ask you if you want to move your current data automatically when you change the location).
![enter image description here](../../I/static/images/692b33def55ee0e117b6842e42416324bb3512e19f53bd923b1d02703e898560.gif)
This second screenshot is actually my "My Documents" pointed at a network drive.
As far as changing the default install location, most programs use these variables to decide where to install (The following output is from doing a set
command at a command prompt), but for the life of me, I cannot find where these are set (it is not in the environmental variables, but I will post back if I can find it later).
ProgramData=C:\ProgramData
ProgramFiles=C:\Program Files
ProgramFiles(x86)=C:\Program Files (x86)
ProgramW6432=C:\Program Files
I'm 100% certain that I once found a GUI way in Windows to remap the user profile to another disk, but I can't find it now. You can just NTFS mount the other disk as C:\Users. This process is awkward to do but it'll work fine afterwards. – jcrawfordor – 2011-07-29T04:16:20.090