Change Your User Profile Location in Vista

 

Yesterday we showed you how to move your home folder to another drive in OS X, and we’ve already done the My Documents move on XP; if you’re a Vista user, now it’s your turn.

It’s pretty easy to do in OS X and XP, but as blogger Joshua Mouch points out (along with other readers), moving your user profile location in Vista is a bit more difficult.

As our resident Windows expert the How-To Geek also points out, "moving the profile folder is… well, a rather scary operation." This is especially true if you’ve been using your computer for a while, since some references to your old user profile location may stay in place after the move. Still, if you’re really desperate to move your user profile in Vista, check out either Joshua Mouch’s somewhat complex method (involving registry adjustments and a whopping 21 steps) or the Vista for Beginners guide—which is a bit more simple but appears less effective overall. (Both are linked below.)

All this difficulty for moving the user profile folder makes us wonder if things will have changed in Windows 7. Either way, if you’ve made this change in Vista using either of the methods below (or your own completely different method), let’s hear about it in the comments. Thanks Terschinbrae and Thor!

Change User Profile Folder Location in Vista [Joshua Mouch]
Move your user files and folders to another partition [Vista for Beginners]

 

Change Your User Profile Location in Vista [Windows Tip]
Adam Pash
Fri, 15 May 2009 15:45:00 GMT