Every now and then I’ll learn a little tip that makes me think “well, if I known that a year ago then it’d have saved me hours of time“. I vividly remember learning how to use the copy and paste functions, all on my own, as a kid. It was like the entire Internet had just become twice as easy for me.Environment variables are a little-known detail of Windows, if you’re a novice user. They belong in this same realm of time-saving conversation. Once you learn about and begin making use of your environment variables, you will quickly begin to see just how much time and effort you can save.What Is An Environment Variable?An environment variable is actually very simple. They act as dynamically-named values that pertain to certain elements of Windows and its file system.As an example, %SystemDrive% is a default system path variable that works with every version of Windows. To you and I, this probably translates to just C:. However, there are people out there who decide it’s necessary to rename their system drive. Someone may decided to set it as drive letter D or E. In those cases, %SystemDrive% would return those values.As another example, there are then discreet value variables such as %TIME% and %DATE%. I’ll bet you can guess what values they hold.Why Are Environment Variables Important?Through each version of Windows, things change. For example, in Windows XP your application data was stored at the path C:\Documents and Settings\{username
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