How to migrate a user account or profile to another computer

Hi there.

A little background. I'm a software developer at a small shop and we're exploring the idea of having a bare bones Linux box or something else with lots or RAM and CPU to run VMWare and Windows 7 VM to host our development environment. We are often installing new components for our development tools and other trial software and the like to research new technologies. Ultimately our machine is so bogged down after 6 months or so that a reformat is necessary. This takes about a day to get everything back into a state to resume development.

We'd like to have master VMs that we keep up to date with the latest Windows updates, antivirus definitions, and versions of the common tools that we all use like Notepad++, Sysinternals Suite, and others. Every so often each of us will grab the master VM to our host machine to have the same copy of our most up to date development environment.

Is there some way to copy down the user profile data so that we can restore it on the new VM when it is deployed? Items of personal preference like desktop shortcuts, Windows themes, pinned items on the taskbar, and other organizational items would be a pain to lose.

Any help is appreciated. I apologize for all of the background info, but maybe others out there have done something similar and have an alternate method for accomplishing what we are trying to do.

Thanks,
Michael

Take a look at "Windows Easy Transfer", built-in to Windows 7.

A tutorial from the forums: Windows Easy Transfer - Transfer To & From Computers