…as in: still keeping as much of your settings and data as possible. When XP is installing, at one point it asks you for the name of the user(s) that should be created. What you actually type will be usernames, which I like to keep short and sweet. I typed in my full name and realized what I did after I installed most of my everyday apps. Blindly copying from the backup did not work, as they had the old path written all over the place. Time to dig…
Here is the procedure that worked for the apps I had at the time. You mileage may vary…
- Do not touch the original folder
- Create new user, give him the same rights as the old one
- Login with new user
- Log off new user
- Login as administrator
- Rename Documents and Settings\NEWUSER to something unique (add 2 before NEWUSER)
- Rename Documents and Settings\OLDUSER to Documents and Settings\NEWUSER
- Login as NEWUSER
- Open registry
- Replace all occurences of OLDUSER with NEWUSER
Firefox tweaks
Do the step 10 (search & replace) in these files:
- c:\Documents and Settings\OLDUSER\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\nw97e6on.default\compreg.dat
- c:\Documents and Settings\OLDUSER\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\nw97e6on.default\extensions.ini
- c:\Documents and Settings\OLDUSER\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\nw97e6on.default\secmod.db
Profile name will of course be different for you.
Thunderbird tweaks
Do the step 10 (search & replace) in this file:
- c:\Documents and Settings\OLDUSER\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\gmclkm48.default\extensions.ini
Profile name will of course be different for you.
MSN Messenger tweaks
Do the step 10 (search & replace) in these files:
- c:\Documents and Settings\OLDUSER\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Messenger\EMAIL\SharingMetadata\Logs\Dfsr.log
- c:\Documents and Settings\OLDUSER\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Messenger\EMAIL\SharingMetadata\volume.xml
- c:\Documents and Settings\OLDUSER\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Messenger\EMAIL\SharingMetadata\volume.xml~
- c:\Documents and Settings\OLDUSER\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Messenger\EMAIL\SharingMetadata\Working\database_4C54_A5A2_54A5_8EF0\fsr.chk
- c:\Documents and Settings\OLDUSER\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Messenger\EMAIL\SharingMetadata\Working\database_4C54_A5A2_54A5_8EF0\fsr.log
- c:\Documents and Settings\OLDUSER\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Messenger\EMAIL\SharingMetadata\Working\database_4C54_A5A2_54A5_8EF0\fsr00002.log
database_XX will of course be different in your case.
General idea is to look where the old username might be used and if that resembles a file path, change it into new path. If you have done the similar, for some other app, please let me know, it might be useful at some point in the future.
Or, you could just remap your path with the help of junction points :)
Yep, I agree, that is an option.
We (company where I worked for) used them in shared sites environment. Since several sites shared the same folders except one or two, we made junctions points and thus updated all of them at once. :)