How in the Tech

Changing the default location of your Windows user profile directory

By Adam Myers ⋅ May 3, 2010 ⋅ Tags: File Management, System Administration

Windows, by default, stores your User Profile directory on the drive Windows is installed on. In Vista and 7, the directory is typically c:\Users while XP’s is found at c:\Documents and Settings. The user profile contains a wide array of data; from local mail folders, to application settings and preferences, to Documents and Music, and even random temporary Internet cache files. It’s not hard to see a lot of things make their home in your user profile. When hard drive space was a major concern, you could often reclaim gigabytes of space by the cruft that wasn’t necessary any longer just be poking around in this folder; assuming you knew what and where to look.

Today, hard drive sizes have grown to ridiculous proportions so the issue has somewhat dissipated – except for the recent convergence towards solid-state drives or SSD. While SSD is insanely fast compared to traditional hard drives, it comes with a great limitation. The sizes available while still remaining somewhat economical to the consumer is constraining. Because of this, it may make sense to relocate the location of your user profile. It’s simple enough to move your Documents or Videos – but as you’ve seen above, it’s only a part of the solution and even though it could represent a large percentage of the space, it ignores another drawback to solid-state – you only have so many writes to the device before failure.

At this point you have two options.

The user profile directory is defined in the Windows Registry under the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE\ Microsoft\ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion \ ProfileList . You can launch the Registry Editor from Start->Run and typing regedit.exe. The registry editor can be intimidating for inexperienced users, so it’s something you want to  be careful in fooling with.

Otherwise, if the registry editing has you concerned, Profile Relocator is a free application that can facilitate the changes for you – without requiring you to get your hands dirty.

Unfortunately for us, neither process provides an easy way to physically move your existing profile over to the new location. For the most part, it’s as simple as copying and pasting from the old to the new directory and rebooting. However my recommendation is to use an application like Profile Relocator after a fresh install, typically after your brand new SSD purchase, as all newly created profiles will reside automatically in the new location – saving you the effort of moving files yourself.

Download Profile Relocator