I'm not understanding why people say it's bad to save games in Program Files (x86). It's the default place to save, but I see absolutely no negatives to doing so. I am able to install mods for WoW just fine by copy/pasting the contents into the Addons folder, yet EVERYONE says it's horrendous to do if you plan on modding any games.

So....can someone please elaborate? There's obviously something I don't know.

I've never heard this before. It's new to me. I didn't even think it was possible to change where saved games were stored.

Windows treats it as a protected directory as long as it's on the system's primary partition by default.

Afaik there's nothing wrong with it, however I don't install games there they go on my External hdd for portability and to save space (my internal hdd is only 148 gb).

I thought about doing that with the external drive I recently got as well. But then I said to myself, 'If you put them on the external drive then you can take it to work and game on the work laptop. Then you'd get even less done than you normally do.'

It's a very bad idea to install games to Program Files due to User Account Control (UAC) in modern versions of Windows. UAC offers more security for the OS and other applications, of course. However, for games, and especially if you want to mod your games, UAC views it as unauthorized tampering, possibly malicious, and constantly raises warnings.

Therefore, it is far better to create a C:/Games folder (or something similar) to install all games in and execute them from.

As for save game files, those are normally in My Games under My Documents, so they are fine.

It makes the load times of games slower too but mine is USB 2.0 not 3, but I'll put up with slower load times to save ￡70 on buying a new hdd.

Eh, I just change the drive letter to use one of my other partitions. I like having all of my stuff lumped together in one folder.


That's a protected directory. However, it's the way Microsoft recommends that games store their saves so it works for saves in most cases.

There's nothing outright bad about it, but it is a directory that needs admin privileges to modify the files within. As such it's a bad place to store files that need to be modify or folders where files will be added and removed with some regularity.

With the introduction of UAC, which implements the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege on Windows, the problem was made much more apparent, as Admin users weren't able to modify the contents of the folder without UAC escalation. Also, programs not ran as admin would have file writes redirected to VirtualStore.

So with the implementation of UAC, it's a bad place to put games in there that have files in need of modification in there.


It's a user-protected directory. Any program launched by the related user has full permissions to it, so it's no problem for any program to write to it.

VirtualStore is also a user-protected directory, which is why programs ran as non-admin have their %programfiles% modifications redirected to it.

Microsoft doesn't care about programs modifying user protected directories, only system protected directories.

Eh, I've seen issues with folks having UAC trouble there so yeah.

After all these years, I still am not fully up to speed on how UAC and all works.

Defron,

Everytime I see you post UAC I immediately start to think Doom's United Aerospace Corporation. Makes me not want to use an OS that runs UAC ever since they opened the gates of hell on Mars' moon.

On the topic of UAC, I find it annoying that it pops up every time I go to play certain games.

I used to have security issues when installing games to x86. Files would be locked in read-only state so I couldn't even install updates without corrupting whole games.

Then I finally found the damn setting to shut it off.... My laptop had come with somewhat high security settings by default, in contrast to my previous one which never asked about permissions or anything.