steam
Most of the articles I've found detail how to move Steam games to another disk. That's not what I want to do, I want to move Steam (the application itself) to an SSD in order to improve the time it takes for it to boot.
What are my options here? I have a 64GB SSD and I assume Steam will fit on it, but my games certainly won't. How can I go about doing this in the simplest manner possible?
Steam now natively offers an easy way to move a game from one drive to another.
First, you must create a "Steam Library Folder" on your new drive, by navigating to Settings > Downloads > Steam Library Folders and clicking Add Library Folder. I recommend creating a new folder on the drive called 'Steam Library' or similar to use as your library folder.
Next, for the game that you wish to move, right-click on it in the games list and navigate to Properties > Local Files > Move Install Folder. Select the newly-created steam library folder from the drop-down list, and hit Move Folder to move the game to the other drive.
This process may take a while to complete, depending on the size of the game and the speed of your drives. Once the game has been moved, Steam may perform a quick "Download" (which actually downloads little or no data), presumably to verify the game files.
You can select the default position of the popup by editing the file resource/styles/gameoverlay.styles in the Steam directory and searching for the Notifications.PanelPosition variable. Possible values are BottomRight, BottomLeft, TopRight and TopLeft.
Note though that the default position can be overridden by the game. In which case, unless the developers have included an option to configure it, you're at a loss.
Best Answer
Just putting the Steam executable on the SSD, and not the games, will not noticeably improve your load time ('boot time' is typically reserved for your OS/computer). The Steam executable has very little data to load compared to a modern game, so the decreased load time from hard drive to RAM will hardly (if at all) be noticeable.
If you still want to do that, simply uninstall Steam and reinstall it, giving the installer the path to your SSD. If you don't want your games on the same drive, you'll have to create another library directory on a different drive when installing your games. Ideally, you'd leave your games where they are and just point Steam to them. This process is similar to this question: Is it possible to move a hard drive with Steam games to a new computer?