Windows

As a Systems Administrator, I build machines regularly. We have a couple of critical, Windows-only applications that we run, otherwise I would have had them drop Windows like that bad habit it can sometimes be. Recently, I was building a new workstation with two hard drives in it, which always means trouble when installing XP. The main problem you get when installing XP with more than one hard drive is improperly mapped drive letters. It seems that no matter which drive you install XP on, the second drive always becomes the C drive, while the system drive becomes E or F. This is a pretty big problem because many applications are hard-coded with the C drive being the system drive and will try to configure themselves on the C drive, regardless of what letter the system drive is. What makes this problem worse is, like anything else Windows-related, the only way to fix it is to format and reinstall.

Granted, I've had my problems with Macs and with Linux, but drive letters are so DOS. Has Microsoft not learned anything from the rest of the world? Drive letters are bad and restrictive. It makes mapping network drives a pain because you have to account for machines that have USB drives or card readers attached that can make local drive letters all the way up to J and beyond. Depending on the size of the network and the company, you can easily outgrow 16 network shares. It may seem like a lot, but when every department wants two or three of their own network drives and you as an administrator need to have access to all of them, you find yourself reaching Z quickly.

Bottom line, if we absolutly have to have drive letters, can we at least have a Windows that can make the drive it is installed on the C drive?