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 document. 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 1981 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 2001, 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. 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 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. Be aware, 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 assign your desired letter to an empty partition first, then install Windows to that
partition. Of course, it would be nice if Windows setup would just straight up ask you what letter
you'd like for your drive to have when you first start using your PC. But quite honestly,
not that many people have been clamoring for Microsoft to stop using the letter C,
so that particular Windows Quirk is probably here to stay. But you could also just rename
your second drive, the A drive, for those ultra important A tier files that you want to keep in
one place. Makes it a lot easier to find them. So guys, if you liked this video, hit like, hit
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topics that we should cover in the future.