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I recently had to recreate a Vista profile again and with this process being a little more complicated in Vista than it was back in XP I thought I’d pass along the info.

If you try to do it the same way you have in the past with XP.  By deleting the profile folder as the administrator and the relogging in as the user you’ll find you get stuck in a “temporary” profile.  Which gets regenerated everytime you login.  Most likely NOT what you were looking for.  But fortunently you haven’t gotten too far off the path.

Recreating A Vista Profile

1. Login as administrator delete the username folder in C:\Users\

2. open the registry and go to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

Locate the S-1-5-xx key which had the old profile name and delete it.

3. Reboot the system

4. Let the user login

I’m amazed at just how soon we forget. I remember not two years ago everyone complaining about the security flaws and instability of XP. Just 7 short years ago people were just getting into hating XP. Do you remember the lines? All the security is going to mess it up, it takes way to much resources, the interface is ugly! Today It seems to be much more popular to sing it’s praises and fight the discontinuation date by buying pc’s as quickly as you can while you can “still” get xp before the june 30th date.

Being in the techinical services field I generally have to be an early adopter when it comes to anything the average small business is going to get into so I’ve been running vista since release candidates. I’ve been very impressed the whole way. I now use it daily on my Asus Laptop (2ghz turion, 1 gb memory, nvidia graphics) and my desktop (p4 2.6, 1gb memory, ATI Radeon 8000 pro). I haven’t had one complaint and have had nothing but stable performance since day one. So why do the masses hate it?

1. People in general hate change. The number one complaint I hear is I can’t find what I’m looking for. This took me all of two days MAX to overcome. Come on people this OS is going to be everywhere for the next 5 years. Just learn it!
2. Many manufacturers rushed inadequate machines to market just to get those early sales when people were excited about a new OS. The machines best buy were selling just barely met the minimum specs. Just take a look at Xp’s minimum specs. Compare them to your system specs… yeah.
3. Vista is the natural progression of things. The OS itself is much more secure than xp ever will be unless you have about 3-4 third party programs protecting you. It’s much more user friendly and no the pop ups aren’t nearly as bad as apple wants you to think. As a tech person I’m glad they are there so my less tech savvy customers and friends are less likely to break things on accident.

So all I’m saying is Vista isn’t the evil looming giant some seem to think and in just a few short years any problems you might have had will be a distant memory and the masses will again be upset about the newest Microsoft offering… it’s the circle of life!

Vista x86 / 32-bit Update (~435 Megs)

Service pack one is finally out! While this might seems like a unimportant event for the average person tons of businesses, schools, and individuals wait for the initial service pack of a windows OS to adopt it as their default platform. So this means update your systems and expect to see vista even more than you currently do.