Windows 10: Delete User Profile in Windows 10

Thanks Brink.
I have prepared myself for that option and I suspect that it will be the cleanest.
I'm inclined to do that.
I trust it will not affect my disk partitions.

 

You're correct. It will only affect the Windows partition.

 

I reset and got rid of my problem.
I also got rid of a lot of "Bloteware" and of course all the HP stuff.
I will try to recover some of the HP support stuff but the rest is well rid of.

 

Great news.

*Thumbs

 

Perhaps I misunderstood the expected results from deleting a user profile? One of my users had trouble with the wifi GUI being blank in his account. I logged in with the local administrator account and saw that there was no problem with that account. So I figured it was a user profile issue and proceeded with option 1 to delete his problematic profile. The good news is that it fixed his wifi problem. The bad news is that he lost a bunch of files that he had saved to his desktop. My understanding is that deleting the profile would reset account customization but preserve actual user files like folders and office documents. Did I misunderstand the procedure or did my unfortunate user just encounter a bug related to profile deletion?

 

Hello Mithion, and welcome to Ten Forums.

I'm afraid that you did misunderstood. Deleting a user's profile will delete the account's "C:\Uses\(username)" folder.

A new profile folder will automatically be created when the user signs in next, but everything in the old profile folder was deleted.

You might check to see if anything may still be in the Recycle Bin. Otherwise, I hope there are backups available. *Sad

 

Thank you for your quick reply! It was interesting because there was a few files in the recycle bin, but many were completely gone. I'll take half the blame as I didn't back up his profile prior to the deletion. But he didn't have a backup either despite the fact our school provide ample network storage and a paid subscription to office 365 with 1TB of cloud storage. So that one is on him. But thanks again for the reply to clarify.

 

I'm sorry that you lost files.

 

Previous versions of Windows gave you an option to 1. delete the user profile and all data, or 2. delete the user profile and save the data. If you chose to save the data, a folder would be created on your desktop with all the library files from the deleted account. Not sure why we don't have this option in W10 - I could have used it several times already. *Sad