Windows 8 Bible

Managing Profile Properties and Environment Variables

From the earliest days of DOS, the PC operating system we old computer geeks used before Windows came along, environment variables have been used to store information used by the operating system. For example, the TMP and TEMP variables tell Windows where to store temporary files. The PATH variable tells Windows where to look for programs if it can’t find them in the current directory. A number of other system and user variables serve similar purposes.

In most cases, you should not need to change environment variables. But if you do — such as when adding a folder to the PATH variable — you can do so through your user account properties. Open the User Accounts object in the Control Panel and click Change My Environment Variables. In the Environment Variables dialog box (see Figure 5.24), click the user variable that you want to change, click Edit, modify as needed, and click OK. You can also click New and then add a new user environment variable.

FIGURE 5.24 The Environment Variables dialog box

Note

Only the built-in Administrator account can modify the system environment variables.