renaming user profile

Eternal Visitor · 22 Jul 2010

first, sorry if this is a duplicate, I couldn't find anything that worked.

I just purchased my new (to me) HP laptop, a former demo unit at the local wal mart, and went through the motions of setting up the system.

course, that sticks me with the user name brenda. I've tried to copy the user folder contents to a new account, but some of the files are access protected (even from the owning user, I checked).

not really to far in to start fresh, but I absolutly hate having to redo all that work cause of one little (really should be easy to fix) issue.

any help on this would be great. thanks in advance.

Dinesh · 22 Jul 2010

Why dont you just create a new user account and delete Brenda?

Bill2 · 22 Jul 2010

1) In addition to creating a new account, you can copy files over from your old profile to the new one. See the page below, it has instructions on how to do that.

Fix a corrupted user profile

2) Otherwise, you can use the standard method of copying profiles. Login into the existing admin account, go to Control Panel> System> Advanced System settings> User Profiles >Settings, choose the user profile you want to copy, then click the Copy To button to copy that profile to another profile.

In Win7, the Copy To button is grayed out when you choose another user's profile. To work around this, you can try using Windows Enabler.

http://brainextender.blogspot.com/20...le-button.html

elsuirad · 22 Jul 2010

Dinesh said:

Why dont you just create a new user account and delete Brenda?

Maybe what he means is there are some files he trying to copy to a new account but those were copy protected.

Why you get inside to the 'Brenda' account (is that your account too?) and copy all files to the newly created account then, you can delete it (Brenda).

Just a suggestion...

Bare Foot Kid · 22 Jul 2010

Hello Eternal Visitor, welcome to Seven Forums!

There is the possibility to use the built in "Recovery Partition" to restore the PC back to if's original factory condition, in essence, you would get a 'new' PC that you could set up as you choose; have a look at the instructions below.

HP Recovery Center

Be advised: that this will take the machine back to the point when you first took it of the box.
The "HP Recovery Center" will give you the option to send to backup anything you
don't want to lose, so have backup media available to use if you choose this option.

With the machine off press the power button, as soon as you do that start tapping the F11 key.
It may take several attempts to do this, if the first attempt fails, try again.
That should take you to the HP Recovery Center. When there just follow the prompts.
It is pretty much self explanatory. From the time you boot into F11 (not counting
any backups you choose to make) you should be back on a working desktop in about
30 minutes. After it restarts just follow the prompts again to finish the process.

If your first option is system restore select no, which should take you to system recovery.
You want to try system recovery not system restore, unless you have good restore points!

Seeing that you have an HP machine; it would be easier to reinstall from the recovery partition. That is this partition that the recovery discs are created from. I have done a recovery from that partition at least 7 or 8 times on my machine; always to great success. Have a look at the instructions below.

Dinesh · 22 Jul 2010

If it has anything to do with the permissions, then take ownership of the files you want to copy and it should be alright.

Eternal Visitor · 22 Jul 2010

I did a file transfer leaving out the shortcuts causing the access errors, and, well, a good 90% success. most of it looks ok, but chrome is broken, the task bar and start menu didn't carry over and I'm willing to bet that a fair number of the preferences need to be reset. no getting around it I suppose.