Turning off support for legacy applications in Windows 7

Question

I want to turn off support for legacy applications that don’t understand long filenames in the 8.3 character standard. How can I do this in Windows 7?

Answer 1

Files that use the 8.3 naming convention can degrade NTFS drive performance. Unless you have a good reason for keeping the 8.3 naming convention intact, such as using 16 bit programs, a performance gain can be achieved by disabling it as follows:

[Start] [Run] [Regedit]

Registry Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem

Modify/Create the Value Data Type(s) and Value Name(s) as detailed below.

Data Type: Dword // Value Name: NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation

Setting for Value Data: [0 = Enabled / 1 = Disabled]

Exit Registry and Reboot

Now any application that requires 8.3 filenames is no longer supported by the operating system, or rather by the file system.