Setting the Netbeans user folder

As I said before in my posts I am a big fan of Netbeans. The biggest advantage is its native support for Maven. No specific action or plugins are necessary to open a Maven project in Netbeans and build,test or deploy it. At one of my current clients I had the restriction that I could only store 50 MB of data in my personal folder. And this was when I found out that Netbeans is caching quite some data by default in your personal folder. So after installing Netbeans I had exceeded the limit in no time. To solve it I had to change the user directory that Netbeans is using and it took me quite some time to find out. So here it is:
In the installation directory of Netbeans you will find the folder ‘etc’. In this folder you have to open the file ‘netbeans.conf’ (make sure to close the Netbeans app first) and you will see the line:

# ${HOME} will be replaced by JVM user.home system property
netbeans_default_userdir="${HOME}/.netbeans/7.0"

Simply change this to:

netbeans_default_userdir=d:/.netbeans

and the issue is solved.