Username change caused serious problems  

If things start going bad again, and the HDD is suspected as being bad (and there are plenty of utilities to test it)....to me that would be the perfect excuse to upgrade to an SSD!

My daughter got a new Lenovo Ideapad 520 for her computation studies at university about a week ago, and this i7 Octacore with 16Gb RAM and Windows 10 is certainly fast, and has great graphic quality.

It's a shame to bottleneck that system with a spinning HDD

Hello NavyLCDR,
Interesting thought - and you´re actually quite right!
A good idea to follow, that we hadn´t thought of yet.

If the HDD is shot, it will actually be cheaper to put in a SSD, (about 80 dollars),
than claiming the guarantee to buy another machine: The special offer we got
included a 250-dollar discount, only valid for stock that has meanwhile sold out.

So, a replacement will not be possible, only a refund, and with incoming stock at
Christmas prices, prices will be higher than before the special offer,
so there is no doubt as to the solution!

Actually, even if the HDD is OK, we´ll probably get a SSD in a few months.

Hello dalchina,
Tomorrow night, apart from installing the Minitool, we shall run a Hdd surface check,
just to make sure nothing has really broken.
Cheers,
Van

Hello dalchina,
Thank you once again, also on the tips of how to manage Minitools. It looks quite straight forward.

We thought there were only three ways to change a Username, but seem to be many more!
My daughter did it as per The 4th Way mentioned in the tutorial that you linked to, with the
netplwiz option. Incidentally, she said she would never ever attempt a user/administrator
name-change again!

Then, answering your other question, she definitely did not rename folder C:\Users\<name>,
only the one-and-only existing user/administrator´s name.

My second daughter presently is insisting again, In her opinion, it was precisely that,
which caused Windows 10 to get its knickers in a twist, but definitely wouldn´t cause a HDD error.
She seems quite adamant about that, surprisingly, as usually she´s quite quiet. As she´s in her
4th year computer engineering at university, she may be right... The problem was we couldn´t ask
her before, because she was out camping a few days, until a few hours ago.

Anyway then, tomorrow night we´ll put in the Minitool and also do a hard-disk scan!

I´ll keep you posted. Thanks for your advice... all this is a lot different from Windows XP, that I still
use on my work-tower.
Cheers,
Van

P.S. Sorry, I hadn´t yet answered your question on the program we used, to create the hard-disk image:
We did it with the option that comes within Windows 10.
V.

Hello dalchina,
Yes, you did mention the unlikelyness of a HDD failure, despite the bathtub curve.
Admittedly, I did have to look that one up! ;-)
Anyway, we shall see how the new installation behaves in the next few days.

It seems that for some odd reason, the disk image made by Win10 last week was
not so good, even though there was no error report. This afternoon, the new disk
image creation went OK too.

There´s a neat little program called HddScan v.4 that I often used when I was recycling
old hardware to re-build old computers to give away. The fastest scan is read-only,
and gives a graph read-out where possible different sized peaks indicate clusters
with slow-reads, 500 ms being the longest before a cluster is declared as faulty.
It can also do a scrolling map-out of coloured boxes, colours depending on reading time.

I´ll let you know what it says tomorrow.
We shall see how the bathtub curve applies to this new hardware!
Cheers,
Van

Hello dalchina,
hello NavyLCDR,

Good news: My daughter´s Lenovo 520 is up and running again, as fast as before, thankfully without problems. She has been busy working with it for the last 3 hours, and the planned Hdd Scan has been postponed. At 24, I can´t tell her what she has to do - only suggest.

There´s one important thing I didn´t know yesterday: After re-loading the first disc-image (created a week ago), the computer failed an hour later after she manually installed some updates and re-started the machine.

Unfortunately we don´t know the update number, but possibly the single User/Administrator name change muddled up the Microsoft user-account and caused the problem... Anyway, that problem no longer applies because after the factory-reset, now there is a new name and account number.

I wonder if it would be correct to say that in conclusion, a single User/Administrator on a computer should NEVER undergo a name change.

However, one small question remains: There´s a Windows Update, its number ending in 1994, that is giving repeated installation errors, but and there is no information on it other than some users getting the same error message since 1217, and we haven´t found anything published on it by Microsoft.

Would this update perhaps be a candidate to be blocked out by Minitool ?

Thanks for your attention and help!
Cheers,
Van

Hello again, dalchina,
I approached my daughter on then subject on her way out to class just now, and was curtly dismissed with a laconic "It won´t fail again after the factory-reset and the new account. The registers had been misdirected by the name change so nothing worked. Bye, Daddy.", and that was it!

So... I think we can mark this thread as solved.

Thank you very much again for your patience and attention!
I must say I have learnt a lot. Who said you can´t teach an old dog new tricks?

I´ve also had a look at the Windows 10 Tips on this forum, which is being very useful to me for my own Acer AMD A10 laptop. I was hardly using it because I was finding Win10 so cumbersome, but not anymore!

Incidentally, and strangely, last night keys b, n, h, y, u, 7 and 8 failed , and it´s not 3 years old yet, so it´s going in for repairs today. Funny... it hasn´t been used much and hasn´t has anything spilled on it.

No rest for the wicked...

Anyway, if I do manage get the Update Number from my daughter, I´ll post it just out of curiosity!

Cheers,
Van