My wife got the fantastic idea to dig up her old laptop that she has not been using for several years, she mostly use her tablets and occasionally her desktop pc. So all of a sudden I knew what do do with my Sunday, nice 😉

It proved to be a bit more work than anticipated, mainly because of stupidity from my side but hey.

• First I updated the OS, which will take a while when the machine has been dormant for 2+ years.
• Then I realized that I has actually migrated her to a new Windows domain meanwhile, so nothing actually worked.

In a perfect world I would have had everything set up with nice GPOs and stuff, but no – that originally was the intent with the new Windows domain, but atlas intentions are one thing reality is something else.

So, how could I get around doing a complete configuration of all her settings and stuff? Well fortunately I remembered a nice utility to transfer user profiles from one Windows PC to another, yes its a bit dirty but it CAN save you hours in a pinch – REALLY.

Its the nice people at Forensit that saves the day;

https://www.forensit.com/downloads.html

A quick note, TransWiz only works on profiles in the same domain (or purely local profiles), if you need to go cross domain you need to use UserProfileWizzard.  Both are free for personal use.

So if you need to do Windows Profile juggling, ForensIT is worth remembering.