Windows 7

dont want it on my C drive. I have an SSD and space is an issue.

I dont get an option to pick where i want to install games when i use the installer.

I can use soft links (google this if intersted) to redirect my gog.com directory to another drive. is there anyway to have gog change?

is this a setting in the registry?

In the installer there should be a "advanced options" or something like that button. It opens a different screen where you can change stuff like that.

On the lower left part of the installer is a button called options. Press it and you'll be able to change the installation directory.
Attached screenshot below.

can i move already installed games? or do i have to reinstall?

You can just move games by cutting and pasting them. This can cause issues that you can avoid by reinstalling.

Any dosbox/scummvm game you can move, Windows games can cause problems, not always but sometimes it will miss something in the windows registry.

So yeah Judascariot does know what he is talking about. :p

I should imagine Start Menu entries would also end up pointing to the wrong places.

Shortcuts as well, but they're quite easy to fix, as are Start Menu entries.

IMHO, if there are no registry issues, fixing the shortcuts and Start Menu entries (which are also just shortcuts) is easy and less time consuming than reinstalling (reinstalling requires uninstalling first).

Maybe but as soon as you wish to cleanly uninstall the game you will have to move things back. That's probably the main reason why I don't manually move installed software around.

Why would you have to move things back? It's possible that the installer just unpacks the games files and creates shortcuts and Start Menu entries - in this cases, the uninstaller just deletes this stuff. If you've moved that game and made sure that the shortcuts point to the correct directory and executables, uninstalling won't produce any errors (if they don't, none of the executables will run correctly when using the shortcuts in the first place).

It's a different story when the registry is involved and messing with the registry should be generally avoided. In these cases, I agree, it's best to do clean installs/ uninstalls.

But the registry is involved for installing and uninstalling. GOG puts something in the registry so that it appears on Windows' uninstall programs thing. And I think it also adds stuff to the Games thing in windows explorer.