Most operating systems have some features that give you exactly that flexibility without requiring you to change the physical locations of things on the hard drives. You can use such a system to place the programs and files you need most frequently in special areas that are easy to access. In your symbolic structure you have some way of creating groups of programs or files. These groups might be in a menu (like Mac System 7 or Win 95 start menu), they may be in folders, or they might be something else! The icons you create in a symbolic structure are generally POINTERS to files, rather than the actual files. The advantage of this approach is that you can comfortably delete a symbolic link to a file without deleting the actual location of the file.