How to move a profile to a new computer?

Old and new computers are running Win 10 2004. All accounts are local, not Microsoft accounts.

My wife's old laptop - her only computer - is dying. My laptop is not my primary computer so I could set her up on it - she does not currently have a profile on it. I'm considering installing programs she needs on my laptop and then copying her profile there, but I'm not sure the best way to do this.

1. Should I copy her whole profile over before defining here userid; then define her userid and hope everything works?
2. Should I define her userid and then copy her profile? (I suspect this would result in an unusable profile.)
3. Should I define her userid and then copy parts of her profile that I think she would need? (I suspect I would be spending months finding pieces of AppData that I missed. Or worse yet, not finding them.)
4. Should I use some other technique I haven't thought of?

I know there is at least one program - Transwiz - that is supposed to make this task easy, but I know nothing about it.

Thanks. That "copy all of the files onto the flash drive except ntuser files" was the important part. I take a daily backup to a NAS of C:\Users\ (excluding *.temp; *.tmp; *.bak; *.~*) on all my computers so I can use the backup of my wifes profile from her laptop (minus the ntuser files) to populate her profile on my laptop

To the OP: Just what in your wife's profile (apart from documents, pictures etc) do you think needs copying? User files are easily copied after new profiles have been created.

Try3 & mngerhold, I don't really know all I need to transfer (and, unfortunately, neither does my wife). For certain I need to copy Firefox, Thunderbird, and Chrome profiles, a profile for a newsletter mailer, options for a newsletter editor, Dropbox options (if such things exist), and a few other things I don't remember at the moment. All of those are in AppData. The there are the things you've mentioned such as Documents, Desktop, etc.

My wife uses an (obviously) old version of Office 2010. I'm going to put Office 2019 on my laptop before passing it off to her. I don't have any idea if her old Office Options will have any meaning to Office 2019. That might be interesting.

Then there are things on my (seldom used) laptop that I will be moving to hers since we will be swapping laptops until we get a replacement for the dying one.

I'll take backups before trying any of this. If the profile copy technique messes things up I'll restore and try with TransWiz. If that doesn't work I guess I'm in for a lot of manual futzing around. Luckily this is not an emergency ... yet.

Try3 said:

Firefox definitely provides for backup & restore of settings so they can be transferred. I know nothing of Thunderbird or Chrome.

I've copied Firefox and Thunderbird profiles to new PCs or after clean Windows reinstalls a number of times so I don't anticipate any trouble there. I don't think I've tried Chrome; that may be interesting.

Try3 said:

Office Options are in the user section of the Registry not in the use profile.

While I could try exporting the registry records and setting them on my laptop, the differences between Office 2020 and Office 2019 might be enough that that would be courting disaster. I think I'll let my wife redo her options. I expect they are the defaults.

Try3 said:

Macrium Reflect is often recommended in this forum for making system images. Other utilities are available but this one is so commonplace that you can get plenty of help for it.
... It can also make bootable system images. This facility is called viBoot and it requires Win10 Pro.

After about 12 years using Acronis True Image, I switched to Macrium Reflect last summer. Since then I've done system recoveries on 3 computers and used a "browse" one computer's backup to to put files on another computer. Pretty straightforward (and much faster than with Acronis).

I've only used bootable system recovery USB thumb drives for doing the system recoveries. I haven't looked into viBoot. My 4 computers all run Win 10 Pro so I guess I could look into viBoot, but I haven't had a good reason to yet. In fact, I haven't done anything with Hyper-V; that's a bit beyond my comfort level.

- - - Updated - - -

Well, there's the plan and there's the process.

Creating the new user account created a lot of profile entries - some configuration-specific (like folders "Intel" and "IntelGraphicsProfiles"), some system-specific (like links to other files), etc. Copying everything except ntuser files didn't seem like a very good idea so I picked specific directories to copy: AppData, Desktop, Documents, Dropbox, and maybe a couple others.

There were some failures in copying some files (permissions? I don't remember.) All I saw seemed to be Python files related to Skype, but I eventually told copy to skip them all. Since I was copying from a Macrium Reflect backup, it's possible that they weren't backed up correctly, but I doubt it. If all the failures relate to Skype then there is no problem; my wife hasn't used it in many months, and we can always reinstall it if needed.

I had to "reinstall" Dropbox (even though it was working fine under my profile). I suspect that there are some directory records that needed setting. And I suspect that eventually we will find similar problems with other programs.

All in all it was a pretty clean process. There was a bit of cleanup needed and will probably be more in the future. And the arrangement of desktop icons was scrambled. But nothing major went wrong ... so far.