Is there a way to tell your computer what default folder you want to save documents in?

Depends, are you talking about downloading and saving items from your browser?

EDIT: I just noticed you mention the temp folder, which implies to me that you are saving from the internet. Depending on the browser you use, the procedure will be a little different. But basically, go into whatever preferences you have (usually under “Tools”) and there should be a tab or a section of a tab that relates to default save locations.

Most programs have in the settings to set a default place for saving files/downloading too.

You can’t designate a download or save folder globally for your whole computer, but you can specify a default folder for each program with which you save files. So, as above, you can specify a folder for your browser to use, you can tell, for example Word to use the same (or a different) folder to save documents, and you can instruct, for example, iTunes where to put music files.

However, and I worry that this is what he was going for, you cannot set up your browser to save different filetypes to different default locations. It just doesn’t work that way. At least not to my knowledge. There may be some kind of fun add-on that lets you do so, though… But I doubt it’d be worth the trouble to look and would likely be unfruitful anyways.

In Windows, when saving a file for the first time you are presented with a list of icon choices to the left side of the “Save As” dialog box. Those icons include My Documents, Desktop, Recent Documents, “My Computer” (or whatever yours is called). (I’m sure that those icons can be modified, too, but I haven’t had to do that in so long that I’ve forgotten how. I think you can add—one or two—icons of your own for other locations, or replace the defaults with your own.)

What I have done is set up a folder of shortcuts to folders that I use all the time: a set of folders for “Proposals”, another set for “Contracts” and a set for “Department”, as well as numerous other locations throughout my system and my network.

So whenever I have a “Save As” dialog, I click to My Documents and from there to the folder for “My Shortcuts” ... and go wherever I want. So in three clicks I can be at nearly any folder in my system that I routinely save to. And modifying that list of shortcuts is a breeze, because I know where they’re all stored (in My Documents \ My Shortcuts)—and I just make new shortcuts as the need arises. I also archive my old and unused shortcuts, for the times when “Proposals” over time turn into “Contracts”, for example.

@Jerikao In the browser there is a choice for “Save as…”

I am with @pdworkin on this; it is set up by application. There is no global preference for this sort of thing. If, for instance, I tell Firefox to save to a particular folder, then MLDonkey will ignore that and save wherever it wants to unless I go into MLDonkey’s prefs and change those as well, and neither of those will affect where OpenOffice puts stuff.

Personally, I generally tell most of my programs to ask me since I put stuff in all sorts of places using sorting rules that most programs have no idea how to parse. The one exception is MLDonkey which has the ability to sort stuff out if you can tell it how to, but that is the exception and not the rule; I have yet to see another program that allows for that sort of configuration.

If you use Mozilla Firefox, you can specify a default folder for all your downloads. There’s a frame for it under Tools/Options…/Main. There is no comparable setting in IE, but you can move the temporary Internet files folder.