Renaming a User Account: A Bad Idea??

Friends I have a question: under Windows 7, I have seen "unintended consequences" of renaming a User Account - sooner or later running into permissions difficulties, path confusion, etc.
I have a fairly fresh laptop I just updated to 8.1 and am trying to get it ready for production environment.
Contemplating either changing the only [only 1] User Account name, or minting a new Administrator level account, then nuking the original.

Which path is preferable?

thx :thumb:

Hello Cognus,

Just changing the user name (display name) won't hurt anything, but the original name will still be tied to the user account.
To truly rename the user account along with it's user profile folder, it would be best to create a new account with the name. Trying to manually rename a user account will usually end in a corrupted user account.

Hope this helps.

Brink said:

Hello Cognus,

Just changing the user name (display name) won't hurt anything, but the original name will still be tied to the user account.

http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/8782-user-account-name-change-windows-8-a.html​

To truly rename the user account along with it's user profile folder, it would be best to create a new account with the name. Trying to manually rename a user account will usually end in a corrupted user account.

Hope this helps.

Click to expand...

that's about what I was thinking shawn. the goodness is that it is so fresh there is little to give up in nuking the original user account
if I could ask similar: will any serious downside occur from renaming the PC itself, again under win 8.1?

If the PC is part of a network (ex: homegroup), then you may need to also restart the PCs in the homegroup to have the new computer name show instead of the old one.