How can I change the user directory name in Windows 10?

Question

I have a user named: 用户alex, and I want to change the 用户 to a English word, how can I do that in Windows 10?

C:\Users\用户alex>xxx install xxx

I want to change the 用户alex name to English words.

Answer 1

Warnings:

• This works
  • I know I have pointed the registry key to a new location when I was working professionally on making a brand-new user account function nicely. It worked nice.
• However, I believe it may be unofficial
• Basically, this just causes a user account to look at a new directory. This changes one setting used by Microsoft Windows. This change does not cause any other programs that might be storing their own copies of information about where files are at. So, this may cause some other problems, that may need to be fixed separately (or might cause you so much anguish that you might decide to revert).

Especially you use the command prompt heavily, maybe you can work around the current problem (of a challenging name) by referencing %USERPROFILE% instead of using C:\Users\(complicated...)

Okay, with that overview/warning out of the way, here are some steps:

1. Make sure that a backup of any critical data is easily accessible
   • Always good to do anyway.
2. Make another user who can log in okay.
3. Make sure that user is a local administrator.
   • Do that before tinkering with the user account you want, just in case a problem occurs that prevents you from logging in as the user you want.
4. (Then, do the remaining steps described here.)

Make an empty directory with the desired name

Graphical Approach: Run a UAC-elevated copy of RegEdit. (That is, right-click on a RegEdit icon or a Command Prompt icon, and if there is a "Run As Administrator" option, choose that. If you ran a command prompt, run RegEdit.)

Go to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

Look through each sub-key for the one that has a REG_EXPAND_SZ value called ProfileImagePath that has the old location.

Right click on it, and say modify.

Command Line Approach: Or, use the command line approach:

1. REG QUERY "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList" /s

2. (Find the relevant ProfileImagePath. Then scroll up to find out which registry key it was.)
3. Change with:
   REG ADD "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\S(SIDdetails)" /v ProfileImagePath /t REG_EXPAND_SZ /d "C:\Users\NewValue" /f

(Customize the "(SIDdetails)" and "NewValue" parts of that last line.)

Next steps:

1. I expect that signing in again is required. I suspect rebooting might also be required (or perhaps just some other process like restarting a service related to logging in, but rebooting the entire computer may be the easier-to-describe step that will successfully do the trick).
2. Try it out.
   • Log in
   • Verify that your directory has changed, as desired
   • Perform further testing, as appropriate. Run key programs to see if they are still working nicely. Especially, if they access important data files that were in your directory, make sure those files can be easily opened without problem.
     • e.g., if in a professional system that uses Microsoft Outlook, does it work right? (Can it find any data files? Speaking of Outlook, if you're ever in a situation where you also changed the spelling of a user account, make sure to check that out too. Does that look right?)

Answer 2

Very simple answer. Create a new user and delete the old. This worked for me, I bought the computer from someone else, and there were no data or programs to keep. I created a new user with admin rights and deleted the old user with admin rights afterwards. The path was changed, and the login username as well, of course.