Win 7 users accounts secrets

Perryg114

Senior member
Jan 22, 2001
768
4
81
What the heck was MS thinking when they made user accounts so screwed up? If you go to a user account including the one you are logged into, there as not files under desktop. I don't know where they are. Things are all over the place with no apparent logic as to where and how all this stuff is organized. Does anyone have the secrets?

I am trying to copy a user account that the Windows Server Essentials 2012 connector moved to a domain account. I got rid of the server software but I am now tied to a domain that does not exist. I can delete the domain account but I can't get that account move back to a local user account. I would think that windows should give you the option of creating a local user account that has all the stuff in it from the domain account.

In XP each user's desktop was actually in the desktop folder under the user profiles. So why make things so unnecessarily complicated in win 7.

Perry
 

SparkyJJO

Lifer
May 16, 2002
13,357
7
81
Good luck moving stuff manually. There are a lot of ACLs that need set right for it to all work correctly. I use a utility to do the move back and forth called User Profile Wizard from ForensiT. Works well, although I haven't tried that with a roaming profile (keep reading).

A user's Desktop is indeed in the "Desktop" folder under their user profile folder. Same with pictures, documents, etc. The exception to this (and what appears to be the case with your setup from the limited info I have that you've given) would be if the PC was on a domain that used roaming profiles. In this case, all that stuff is actually stored on the server, not the workstation, and there is simply a local cache of the data in basically a temporary folder.