While I’m never shy about just table-flipping and formatting my hard drive, some are decidedly more hesitant to reinstall their operating system. But creating a new user profile can be almost as good and only takes a minute.
Why though?
Beyond troubleshooting, there’s other reasons you might want to create a new profile. When we rolled out a bring-your-own-device work-at-home program at my company back in 2012, we suggested the home users consider creating new “Work” profiles on their computer to create a clean space without any personal files and clutter, and to create some separation between their work desktop and their personal desktop.
On the troubleshooting side, I’ve encountered users that have difficult issues that are not repaired by more common solutions like DISM and System File Checker. Before taking extreme steps, testing if the issue follows you to a new profile can save considerable time. While refreshing or running a repair-install of Windows can take an hour or more and reinstalling completely easily takes a half-hour (plus time reinstalling programs), creating a new profile only takes 60 seconds. If it works, you just saved a significant chunk of your day and can simply drag-drop your files into the new folder and remove the broken profile. Programs installed system-wide will still be there, too.
Regardless of the reason why you are creating it, there are two ways to create a new profile: by using the Settings app, or from the command prompt. Either method gives the same end result, so take your pick:
Method 1: Creating new profile via Settings
With the Settings app, creating a new user can be done under Accounts / Other Users. Microsoft will really nudge you to use a Microsoft Account here, but if you find the option to decline (at least twice) it’ll let you create a local-only account instead.
Even if you do want an online account, creating it locally at first will make sure your user profile folder in the C:\Users directory is named sensibly, so I recommend doing this anyway.
Once created, be sure to set the new profile as an administrator-level user if you do desire, especially if you are planning to delete the old profile later.
Method 2: Creating new profile with the command line
If your current profile is in such a broken state that you cannot create a new user profile with the Settings app (or you just want to avoid the hassle of repeated requests to link an email or online account) you can also create it from a Windows terminal shell easily (and without nagging prompts to create online-linked accounts first). Here’s how:
First run Command Prompt as admin, then type the following commands, replacing the underlined text with your own choices.
net user /add username passwordDon’t use any spaces in your username; what you type here will also be used for the folder created inside the c:\users\ folder the first time this user logs in. This creates a new profile named “username” with a password of “password”. The password is optional, if you leave it out of your command the user account can be used by anyone by just clicking it at the login screen.
If you want this new user to have total administrator access to the computer, also type in the following command to add this username to the administrators group. This is highly recommended if you are troubleshooting or otherwise plan on removing your current user profile later. Make sure the username you type here matches the same one you used above.
net localgroup administrators username /addAfterwards, you should see basically this output:
Whichever method above that you use, once you’ve created the new profile it’s time a test it. You can switch to the new account from the Start menu by clicking your user profile picture/name and then clicking the new account in the list. Or you could log off or restart entirely if you wish.
Or if you still have the command prompt open, you can also type this to log off:
shutdown /lWhat to do next?
From the shiny new and squeaky-clean profile, you can see if the issue you had is resolved or just get started using it if you weren’t troubleshooting. If you have files in your old profile, you can retrieve them from the C:\Users folder. I would highly recommend only dragging files you care about from within subfolders (for example, from OldUser\Documents into NewUser\Documents). Don’t try to actually drag the single documents folder itself, or other folders like AppData and the like, doing so can cause much larger headaches. And although there’s no hurry to do so, when you’re ready you can delete the broken or old user account anytime.
As well, should you wish to use Microsoft Account features, you can link your new profile to it by opening Settings / Accounts and finding the option to “sign in with a Microsoft account”.
