Sunday, December 17, 2006

Vista, second take

I spent the last few days assembling a low end vista box - a 1GB DDR2/667 Sempron 2800 based barebone. The system is amazingly fast for such a slow processor (no perceived delay interaction, and amazingly memtest diagnoses that main memory access is just as fast as L2 cache access). All components functioned out of the box with stock drivers. It's probably the prettiest computer I ever built. I could not be happier.

During the process of setting up the machine, I had to find a way to move the user accounts to the second harddrive, so that they are safe in case of OS reinstalls and upgrades. This should be and actually is an easy task, but I haven't found it properly documented anywhere. Hence:

  1. Create a user account via Administrative Tools / Computer Management / Local Users and Groups / Users
  2. Log into the user account you just created and log out again
  3. Control Panel / System and Maintenance / System / Advanced / System Settings / Advanced / User Profiles / Settings... / Copy To... and copy the user account to its new home
  4. regedit and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
  5. You can modify the root of all users right here, or move dedicated accounts to the other drive, which is what I did
  6. Find the guid for the profile you just moved and change its ProfileImagePath
  7. Restart the machine
  8. Remove the old folder under C:\users
  9. Done!

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