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How do I change the default preferences directory?

By default, Mathematica® creates its preferences directory in one of the directories below, depending on your platform.

•	For Windows 95

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Mathematica\4.0

•	For Windows NT

C:\users\<login>\Mathematica\4.0

(If you’re using Mathematica 3.0, you can replace the 4.0 above with 3.0.)

If you want to change this location, you’ll need to follow these steps on setting the MATHEMATICA_PREFERENCES variable.

Note that under Mathematica 4.2, this variable has been renamed to MATHEMATICA_USERADDONS.

For Windows 95

1.	Open the config.sys file in a text editor. This file is typically located on the root level of your boot drive (C:\config.sys).

2.	Add the following line to this file.

SET MATHEMATICA_PREFERENCES=C:\TMP

3.	Reboot your machine.

For Windows NT

1.	From the Start menu, select Settings, then select Control Panels, then open the System control panel.

2.	Click on the Enviroment tab, and set the variable `MATHEMATICA_PREFERENCES` to C:\TMP.

In both of these examples, the preferences directory now used is:

C:\TMP\Mathematica\4.0

One reason that you may want to set a different preferences directory is to shorten the filename paths to run the Windows 95 ScanDisk utility.

http://support.wolfram.com/archive/mathematica/scandisk.html

Questions or comments? Send email to support@wolfram.com.