What are user profiles

- [Instructor] In this video, I want to show you what user profiles are, because user profiles are going to be a big subject with some of the videos that are coming up. Right now, I'm logged in to this computer as a user with the username, User1. And if I open up File Explorer and I go to This PC and I go to my C drive, you can see that I've got a folder here called Users. And if I go into that Users folder, there are folders with the names of every user that has previously logged on. So, I have a folder for Administrator, for Brien, and for User1.

There's also a Public folder. So, these folders are part of the user profile. They contain everything that's going to be unique for that particular user. They also store the user's documents. If I go into the User1 folder, you can see the elements that make up the profile. We have things like Contacts, Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Favorites, Links, Music, OneDrive, Pictures, Saved Games, Searches, and Videos. So, these are all things that are unique to the specific user. So, what I want to do now is go ahead and close this out and I want to login as a different user.

So, I'm going to choose the Sign Out option and I'm going to log back in, but, this time, instead of logging in as User1, I'm going to login as User2. And you can see that Windows says that it's getting things ready for User2, because this is the first time that User2 has logged in. And one of the things that Windows is doing to get itself ready for User2 is to create User2's profile. So, now, if I go back into File Explorer and go to This PC and go to the C drive and go into Users, we can see that now there is a folder for User2, because User2 has now logged onto this PC.

So, all of User2's documents and unique settings are now stored in this folder. So, that's just a quick taste of the way that user profiles work in Windows 10.