Creating a custom default user profile in Windows 10

[Music] hi everyone my name is james rankin and for today's video for this channel we're going to be talking about how you can create a custom default user profile to run on windows 10 and hopefully as part of the same process i'm going to show you some tips and tricks that you can use to get around some of the limitations of the microsoft documented methods so first of all why would you create a custom default user profile on the images that you deploy for your users well quite simply the main reason is to give yourself some sort of proper branding this here is a bog standard windows 10 machine as you can see it's got the standard microsoft branding standard microsoft pinned items things like that and it looks fairly bland and if you're in an enterprise or education sort of environment you would probably want this for a user logging on for the first time to be branded in a particular way and present certain applications to them certain pinned items things like that desktop backgrounds lock screens all that sort of stuff to look for a good corporate branding in there so that's why people use custom default user profiles to deliver that to every user that logs on now obviously you can do these things with policies as well but the beauty of using a customized default user profile is that policy sometimes for whatever reason might not apply if you've got it inside the default user profile on the device then that means it's going to apply to every new user who logs on so every user that logs on to that image will get that same experience delivered to them at their first log on time now i know i said this was for windows 10 and we're going to demonstrate it on windows 10 but the process that we're going to run through can equally be used on windows server 2016 or server 2019 as well so how do we go about creating a customized default user profile now originally in windows 7 and earlier you could actually just use a user that already existed you could log on change that and then copy it off somewhere and use it as a custom default user profile you still can do that but it's very very fiddly involves a lot of changing of registry permissions file system permissions a lot of deleting things and the problem is microsoft said for a long time that way is not supported and even though you can get it to work now as windows 10 versions move along the potential for it just completely breaking as a new update comes along is very big so i definitely wouldn't recommend using that method anymore we're going to use the microsoft documented method with just a few little tweaks done ourselves to get around some of the limitations now the first thing that you need to do is to go to the link that's in the description of this video because in there i've got a public dropbox link to a couple of xml files that are going to help you out with some of the more complicated bits so make sure you've got those downloaded first and you should be able to see here there's a quick video of me doing the downloading make sure you've got that done as well now obviously the next stage is because we're using the microsoft documented way of doing this we need a windows 10 image because that's how you create the default user profile we create a new windows 10 image and we use sysprep to copy a default user profile from the one that we create so you need to build a windows 10 image whether that be enterprise or education or professional whatever version you use build a new windows 10 image make sure you've got all the applications installed in that image that you want to you know maybe pin items four to the start menu or the taskbar because otherwise obviously if they're not installed you won't be able to pin them but when it gets to this stage that's shown on the screen where it's asking you for the region that you want to you know go into and keyboard layout and things like that don't click yes or select any of those what you need to do is press ctrl shift and f3 hold down control shift and then press f3 and the computer will go into what's called audit mode which is a special sort of mode of windows that allows you to perform customizations within the image prior to doing the sys prep so once you get into ordered audit mode audit mode you'll be presented with this screen which shows you that sysprep is actually prepared to run but just click on cancel at that point now what you can do at this point i know i said you needed to have your applications installed in the image if you can't deliver them prior to the screen you can actually install applications now that you want a pin in there i'm actually going to install chrome on here now so just give me a couple of seconds and i'll get that done now as you can see one here i have now installed chrome so anything that you want to pin as i said to the taskbar or the start menu you need to make sure it's installed at this point if you haven't got it already installed in the image and obviously it goes without saying that once we create this default user profile on this machine you should then either copy that into your image or use this machine as the basis for the image that you're going to create whichever way it is that you do that so anyway an important thing now is when we're in audit mode is to make as many customizations as you feel you need to get into line with your corporate branding so i'm just going to make a load of changes here now let's first just change the desktop background out here so just to show it's changed let's just change it to a nice solid blue let's change the desktop icons around a little bit just to show that that bit is covered so let's add a couple in there let's go down to the taskbar and make some changes to that let's make it smaller and let's never combine because that's one of my pet heads that things are get combined on the taskbar also um select which icons appear in the notification area i like to see most of them in there now next we're going to just quickly rearrange the desktop icon so again that we'll be able to see easily that things have changed on there let's throw the chrome and edge shortcuts in the recycle bin and empty it because we don't want those on the desktop we're going to pin them somewhere else let's unpin the default stuff from the taskbar let's hide task view and cortana and search again just to show that these things can all be changed and added to the default user profile let's unpin everything from start as well and we're going to pin our own customized things on that now as i said there's not a lot currently installed on this machine besides chrome so let's pin chrome to the start menu let's also pin a couple of universal windows platform apps as well because it's important to put those on there because they behave in a slightly different way which we're going to see in a bit and let's pin some things to the start menu sorry the taskbar as well what can we pin something random registry editor and let's get another uwp app on there as well i know they're all truly awful but let's just throw paint 3d on there as well right so we've customized that image to the amount that we've done there yeah we've changed things like that the background and the layout and all sorts of other little things as i said you may want to go a lot further or maybe not even that much at all you know you might want to do things like lock screens screen services all sorts of things you can change but get it all done at this point that's the most important bit now at this point if you didn't make any customizations such as pinning items to the start tiles or the taskbar you can't actually skip ahead to step four because one of the weird things about the the latest sort of iterations of microsoft's operating systems is that no longer will start tile pinned items or taskbar pinned items be brought across when you use sysprep with copy profile so as i said if you haven't done any of that pinning you can skip ahead to step four and avoid this bit because this bit is where it gets really complicated so anyway if like me you have pinned items to the start tiles as we see here actually we'll we'll give them a name as well just to show that that can be persisted as well if you've pinned items to the start tiles like that or to the taskbar we need to perform some really complicated extra steps here to allow us to do this first bit is to get the items from the start tile so what you need to do is actually run powershell at this point not as an admin just as a standard the standard user that you're logged in as so launch powershell and the commandlet that you need to use is export dash start layout minus path and then for the path type dollar env colon local update you know your powershell you'll know that that's an environment variable for local app data backslash microsoft backslash windows backslash shell backslash and finally the name of the file layout modification dot xml let's just put a capital l on there because i am a bit and what about those sorts of things that's the command you need to use press return there now what this will do is it will actually export out the layout of your start menu to see column box users backslash administrator that's what this user is called this audit mode user update uh local microsoft windows shell and you can see that in there that is called layout modification however now you probably know how this works when a new user logs on for the first time it uses this file default layouts to create the default start menu tiled items and if you have a file called layout modification that applies modifications to that based on what you've done so that's enough to cover the start menu but the taskbar is a totally different kettle of fish now you remember those two files i told you to download one was called unattend dot xml the other one was called modification.xml you need to get the one called modification.xml right now and get it on the machine so i'm quickly going to go and grab that just now so you say no in the background there that the modification xml file has appeared on my desktop there right so that's one thing that we need to grab right now so what you need to do is this is a bit fiddly is run notepad as an administrator first of all and then click file open on that and switch text documents text documents to all files and the file name you're looking for is c colon backslash users backslash administrator backslash backslash local if you just go to there and then you can browse through a microsoft windows shell and as long as you've got the view set with all files save layout modification there open that up there's your layout modification file right now the first thing we need to do is just minimize all of this stuff and now open up right click and edit your modification.xml file right so from modification.xml you need to copy all of this so right click copy that kind of first set there go back to your layout modification file you need to highlight the entire top row and delete that and then paste in what you copied from the modification.xml file right be very careful here the formatting needs to be exactly right let's paste that in so the key thing here is actually in the schema that we're kind of declaring here it tells you that this file will do a start layout but you actually need to get this bit added in to do a task bar layout as well right so that's the first part we need to do in our layout modification file get that pasted in quickly save that however we're not done yet go back to your modification file the one that i provided you with now if you look down here after it says default layout override you need to highlight all of this here right that particular set of stuff there right highlight that right click and choose copy now go back to your layoutmodification.xml file that you're editing over here and after default load override section at the bottom here pull the cursor at the end there press return and then paste in what you just copied from there right now you with me so far because we're not finished yet i told you this bit was horribly complicated because what we've just posted in there are just a bunch of apps that i did earlier so you'll see they're listed here there's the ones that this would pin to the taskbar right component services powershell and sticky notes now like i've done here i've got some different things pinned at the taskbox we need to change those over so bear with me save layout modification right now close modification.xml we're done with that and actually delete it off the desktop because we don't need that anymore and if we leave it there it'll get brought into the default profile i hope you're still following me here right now the items you pinned to the taskbar yeah now unpin them from the taskbar but remember what they were right paint 3d and registry editor is what we had here so we'll unpin them from the taskbar now find the same files that you want to pin right and pin them to the start menu instead bear with me i know this is absolutely ridiculous so pin to start paint 3d and the other one we had was registry editor might make sense to do this the other way around don't remove them first so you've got a reference so you can see what they are um i can't remember where it was registry editor can anybody help me out here i could just search for it but let's have a look reg edit dma couldn't remember pin that to the start as well right so now you've got these two items that you want to pin to the taskbar pinned to the start as i said bear with me right now go back to powershell again right and do the export start layout again so export dash start loud minus path this time we're going to drop it out to a file on the desktop so c call on backslash users backslash administrator it's always called administrator desktop and call this one modification dot xml as well so that's now appeared on the desktop right so now as i said bear with me edit this modification.xml and you need to look down here at these things that say desktop application link path and app user model id right so this point switch back to layout modification now here is the bit that does your taskbar pinned items for you right so you universal windows platform apps those modern apps always start with taskbar uw air anything that you've got that's a desktop app a legacy app starts with taskbar desktop app i hope you can see where i'm going with this so back here copy oh god copy this bit here if i could do it says app user model id and everything after it up to the call on right copy that switch back to layout modification now get the bit that says app user model id this one's for sticky notes make sure you get it done perfectly because all the space and everything matter and just past that over the top so now it's been replaced with the one from modification now for anything that's desktop you see we've got this thing here that says desktop application link path right down here yeah so go back to the modification one here and also grab it from the bit that says desktop application link path so this is the one we want highlight all of that as i said i really hope managing to bear with me here i told you it was a bit non-trivial get that bit up to the the quotation mark click on copy switch back to l modification and as we said get rid of this bit here up to the quotation mark and paste in registry there now but there is a third one in here so anything else you can simply remove from there and then tidy it up like that that's almost done one more thing to bring your attention to is this line here that says custom taskbar out collection pin list replacement replace this means that everything defined here will replace anything on the taskbar so you'll only get those icons that you've specified if you wanted to get the default taskbar icons and just add some extra ones to it then just remove this bit here delete that bit from the file including the space right but i want to replace them so i'm going to leave that in are you still with me i hope so right click on file click on save so now close down modification.xml don't forget throw that in the recycle bin click on yes make sure it's cleared up so now in our say users administrator update a lot of microsoft windows shell we have a file called layout modification and it looks like this now right so at the top we've added these schemer in so we've got taskbar and start layout in there in here we've got the start tiles go there we've got different entries in there for desktop applications and for uwp applications and then down where we've got this other set custom taskbar layout collection we've got our taskbar pin list in there as i said again different for uwa apps they start with taskbar uwe the desktop app start with taskbar desktop app that is really really really non-trivial way of doing things but that should be done now and we are ready finally to move on to the sysprep phase but you're not done with the xml files yet no no way microsoft lumbex and l files these days the other one in there was called unattend dot xml so make sure you grab that as well and get it down the machine we're going to go and grab it now so you can see unattended.xml has magically appeared on my desktop over here now we have a look at the unattend file i have got a blog post somewhere that talks about everything it is but normally you don't need a lot of stuff in there what you do need to pay attention to is you need to make sure obviously your processor architecture is correct and i believe somewhere in this file it's totally forgotten about there it is um look for the the source of your install files mine's in an iso in the d drive the windows 10 enterprise install win is there so make sure that matches as well the other thing you need to have in your unattended.xml is this copy profile needs to be true right this is the bit that does what we're after this is the bit that copies the profile so that's most vital parts so make sure as i said everything matches up mainly your install source make sure you've got the copy profile switch set to true i often find if you've got the the source files the same you can just use this file straight away now you need to put this file somewhere because we've got to reference it so i'm actually going to cut it out of there and just drop it in the root of the c drive so it doesn't appear in the profile when we copy it right that's nearly everything we've had to do with xml files so now we need to do sysprep right so the sysprep path is c windows system 32 sysprep backslash sysprep dot xe pop spacing because we need a load of switches forward slash ub or b a forward slash generalize with a z not an s forward slash reboot and then forward slash unattend followed by a call on and then the path to the unattended.xml file we just dropped in the c root so c column backslash unattend dot xml and then you go and run this straight away now now at this point you can actually remove uwp apps from the user profile if you want and from the image i haven't done it in this instance but i do have another video that shows how to do this if you do remove them at this point and when you run sysprep you get an error it's usually because you've removed the provisioned app but not removed it from this user's profile so make sure you don't just use remove dot remove dash app x provisioned package you also use remove dash app x package as well all the details are in one of my previous videos so let's just press return there and we should say sysprep start to run now he says waiting with bad breath as it fires up there sysprep will now go off do all of that stuff copy that profile to the default user profile on the machine then it will reboot and run through the first run cell which we'll need to do however there are a couple of other little bits that we'll need to do after that as well but let's just let that complete and we'll pick it up when it has so you should find when the machine has successfully rebooted after doing the sysprep you'll be back at this screen again when it's in let's start with region it's the first run setup and this time we can actually go through with it so let's do all of the normal first run stuff go through their very important setting up that we have to do at this point accept the windows 10 license agreement and either sign in with a microsoft online account or do a domain join instead which is obviously the bit that i'm going to do so i'm just putting the password into the admin account and filling in all the effect answers to security questions as you can see i really really care about these and finally provide all the stock answers that you would to all of these features that microsoft wants to turn on for you there are about nine of these things you have to click through now which is really annoying and the last one that and now it should finally ask me if i want to log on there we go it's doing the first run setup and we should say that i should hopefully get the default profile from that one that i just created so our login is finished and the user has logged in and it looks pretty much like it is inherited the default profile we have the two pinned items on the taskbar there and we should also have all of our stuff on start as well there we go so everything that we put in there should be there we've got my applications on there chrome weather sticky notes from there which is some reason it's called stickies by microsoft two pinned items down there and everything else seems to be working perfectly as normal um it's looking really good just a couple of briefings imagine obviously google chrome has appeared on the desktop that's because when you install chrome it puts out a stub path that every time a new user logs in it puts a shortcut on the desktop so you delete that if you want i just forgot to do it and one final thing i would also do is if you go into this pc and the c driving the users and if you actually go into the default folder which is hidden by default and turn on hidden items and go to options and go to view and don't hide the protected operating system files you'll just see a few bits of crap you can get rid of these files here can be safely deleted get rid of those the ones with the log and the blf and the reg trans extensions and also if you're looking at what it does with the default profile as well it tends to copy quite a lot of stuff into there and you can get rid of some of it if you want now in the roaming folder i'd be a bit careful with this one because i've seen people start maybe delete that adobe folder because that blatantly isn't required at all you can delete local law as well because as i said that isn't required at all and in the law or folder there's a bunch of stuff in here you could get rid of as well now it's up to you at this point whether you want to delete the rest of this stuff because it's a bit fiddly the point i'll make is all this stuff in the update a lot of folder adds up to around 280 megabytes at the minute so if you want quite a lean default profile then you do need to get rid of it you don't have to but you know you can still do it if you want to do it though you've got to right click the local folder and go to properties and go into security and then click on advanced where it says owner click on change type in administrators replace owner on sub containers and objects make sure that's ticked as well and also take the box to replace all child object permissions with inheritable permission and please click on ok i'll give you a warning and then it will go through and take ownership of everything again click on yes again let it go through and hammer through everything now you should be able to go into local highlight everything in there by pressing ctrl a except for microsoft you don't want to get rid of the microsoft wallet so delete everything else in there click on yes to confirm several times say it's deleting quite a lot of stuff there then open the microsoft folder again highlight everything apart from windows and again delete all of this permanently and click on the multiple prompts that you will get for it to play all of this and again the next folder this one a bit more complicated you want to delete everything apart from the shell folder obviously because that contains our layout modification file that we took so hard to create so don't delete that you also want to keep the winx folder because that gives you the items on your right click start menu the windex menu and the user class dot dot as well which is part of the registry entries but delete everything else apart from those and again click on the authentication prompts and you should be left with all those there now so hopefully the entire default folder shouldn't be 280 meg anymore it's about four meg and i don't think we looked in the update a roaming folder under microsoft there it's got a few bits of stuff you could delete some of those as well but you're not going to save much in there so i would recommend it just leaving it we've now got it right down to that so now we are done with create that custom default user profile now you can take this image whether this is a windows 10 image as i said the same principles work for server 2016 and server 2019 you can turn that image join it to the domain put it into sccn put it at pbs mcs whatever you need to do start work on it now you have that customized default user profile there what i'm quickly going to do just to finally show you that it's all working so i'm quickly going to join this machine take this image and put it onto one of my demand joined machines and log on to it so give me one second and i will join it to the domain so i've got the image joined to the domain now and i shall just log on to it obviously this time we're going to switch users now you can see it's giving me the chance to sign in to the domain login as a different user one of my test users and we should use that custom default user profile that we've got set up and stored on this image now obviously it does have the same apps installed but most images generally do just let it get logged on through the first run stuff which normally you would you know you would disable this via policy and we'll discuss more about policies that can help things run a bit better in a future video as the man says we are almost there let's wait for it to complete logging on hopefully we should say that it's got start layout it's got the background it's got the size for taskbar it's got those two pinned items down in the taskbar that we had so much trouble getting in there and it's got all of our stuff on the start menu that we pinned as well and the descriptions right so there you go that is how we can go and create a custom default user profile on windows 10 that'll also work on server 2016 and 2019 um yeah quite a convoluted process hopefully you don't have to do it very often and there are lots more advanced things you can do around this so look out for some more videos in future where we talk about doing different things with the layout modification xml file and some more advanced things you can do around the policies and the look and feel and all sorts of other goodness as well i hope that's been useful and not too long but as i said quite an advanced video but thanks for sticking with it and hopefully that will be handy to you in your deployments in your enterprise environment better than the press

Channel: James Rankin

Views: 14,230

Keywords: Windows 10, custom default profile, create custom default profile, profiles, Windows

Id: 9T3BxGxX3Ck

Length: 32min 32sec (1952 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 14 2020