you're probably reminded of how windows usually lives on your c drive every time you open up file explorer to search for that super important word documents placed but why does the most important drive on your computer get assigned to the third letter of the alphabet is microsoft tacitly admitting that windows is an average operating system come on microsoft would never do that the answer goes all the way back to the early days of personal computing when dos was the big time operating system of the day you see early pcs often did not come with hard drives in them those were expensive back then so instead users would often run their operating systems and other programs directly off of floppy disks this included dos which by default assigned the letters a and b to the floppy drives many early computers like the original ibm pc from NUMBER_TOKEN were often configured with two floppy drives so this letter assignment scheme made sense so once hard drives started becoming more commonplace later in the same decade operating systems started to assign the next letter that wasn't reserved for floppy drives c and while early versions of dos actually would still assign c to a third floppy drive if the system had that many later versions always reserved c for an actual hard drive but because windows was originally based on dos windows continued the tradition of assigning the letter c to the main hard drive by the time we got windows xp in NUMBER_TOKEN which was the first non-dos windows for home users the convention of using a for floppy drive and c for the main hard drive was firmly cemented even though pcs don't come with floppy drives anymore and it's getting harder and harder to find computer cases that even have floppy drive bays windows has stuck with assigning c to the system drive since there hasn't been much reason to break from the convention and many third-party programs are written assuming that c is the location of the windows install making changing the paradigm even more icky there's even more interesting things here which i'll tell you about right after this message from our sponsor set app setup curates NUMBER_TOKEN paid apps for mac for a fraction of the cost each app is hand-picked to boost productivity just navigate to a category and get your hands on the best problem-solving tools all at once such as the ai photo editor luminar the famous clean my mac and many more get a seven-day trial at the link in the video description okay so what about the other letters after c windows assigns remaining letters in order to any other attached stored devices unless we're talking network drives in which case windows will actually start with a z or z for you americans and work its way backwards but let's say this doesn't sit particularly well with you and being the logical computer enthusiast you are you want to use the letter a for your main system drive makes sense i won't hold that against you there's actually nothing stopping you from doing this on your own if you open up windows disk management you can change the letter of your system drive by right clicking on it picking the change drive letter and paths option and just selecting an available drive letter from the drop down menu beware though that doing this could break programs that are already installed on your computer that are looking for c as we previously mentioned if you really don't want to use c for your system a better but still not perfect way to do this is to
START_SPONSOR_TOKEN there's even more interesting things here which i'll tell you about right after this message from our sponsor set app setup curates NUMBER_TOKEN paid apps for mac for a fraction of the cost each app is hand-picked to boost productivity just navigate to a category and get your hands on the best problem-solving tools all at once such as the ai photo editor luminar the famous clean my mac and many more get a seven-day trial at the link in the video description END_SPONSOR_TOKEN