I had used only a local account on my Surface Pro 4. After the tablet has finished installing the Windows 10 Fall Creator’s update and I log into system, it just creates a fresh account with administrator for me. All of my personal preferences settings for desktop backgrounds, pointer preferences are missing and the old username doesn’t appear in the login screen. However I access the Users folder in C:\ driver, all data of the old account are over there. How can I change the name of its profile folder.
The Windows 10 may create a new account and remove the old username during the Fall Creators Update process. But it keeps all personal setting files. You could migrate your old profile into the new one.
* First make note of your current account’s username.
* From your desktop, type cmd in Windows search box, right click on “Command Prompt” from result, and select Run as administrator option.
* Type the comand below in Command Prompt:
wmic useraccount get name,SID
and press Enter to execute it.
* It will list all of the username and its SID. Find your old account, and make note of the SID which is next to the name. For example, the SID of my old account is S-1-5-21-237214570-1361833723-
* Press Win + R from your keyboard, type regedit in Run box, and click OK button to open Registry Editor.
* Navigate to the location in the left side:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
Under the ProfileList folder, click on the the actual SID which you have noted in the above step.
* Go to its right side pane, double click/tap on the ProfileImagePath string.
* Its value data is the original full path and name. Make note of the full location like C:\Users\original-username. Then change original-username to the new name for your current account, and click OK button to save all.
* Open the File Explorer, go to the C:\Users\ path, right click on the old user profile folder, select Rename option, and change it to the same new account name.
That’s all. Finally re-sign into system to check if the new account restore your old setting files.