Recreating a Windows profile is certainly much quicker than having to rebuild you computer from scratch, and it can offer many of the same benefits such as improved speed and better resiliency.
Recreating a Windows profile itself is very straight forward, but some things will change, planning ahead will save you lots of time as well as making the whole process problem free.
Windows Profile Tips
Before recreating a Windows profile make a note of the following
- Your Internet browser home page
- Any email account settings, such as username, password, mail server.
- Make a note of your email storage folder location (checkout our other articles for more help on this)
Recreating a Windows profile simply means renaming the current profile for example if the profile was named Computer-Adviser I could rename it to Computer-Adviser-Old.
If you are using Windows XP you can find your Windows profile in the directory C:\Documents and Settings, if using Windows 7 or Vista it can be found in C:\Users.
The name of the directory will be the same as your Windows login name.
Note – You cannot change the name of the Windows profile of the current logged in user; you will need to restart the computer and login using a different name.
Once logged in as another user changed the profile name of profile you wish to create, now restart the computer – log back in as the original user, Windows will now recreate the Windows profile for this user.
Once logged back in go to C:\Users or C:\Documents and Settings there will be two user profiles, for example, as above if our original profile was renamed to Computer-Adviser-Old, there will also now be a new profile called Computer-Adviser.
Once your happy than the new profile is working ok you just need to copy your files from the old profile, I Would recommend copying the following folders from the old profile to the new.
Desktop
Favorites
My Music
My Pictures
Now you only need to setup your email, Internet browser home page.
Recreating your Windows profile is perhaps the next best thing to a complete system rebuild, the main advantages it has a over a complete rebuild is it only takes around 20 minutes, and unless any applications are profile dependent you do not need to reinstall any.
Your computer should hopefully function much better as recreating a Windows profile means a clean start for it with no messy profile dependent temp files or bloated registry entries.
I generally recreate my Windows profile every 6 months, this way, barring any other hardware problems I generally only have to rebuild my computer when I actually replace it, which is normally around every 3 years or so.