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I just switched from a local account to a "Microsoft Account" and I'm wondering now which local username I have now? Do I still have my old local username?

If not, i.e. for changing permissions of folders etc, which username (and domain?) do I have to use?

4 Answers 4

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Yes - run net users from the command line, or hit Windows Key+R, type compmgmt.msc and expand the users list to see your user name - it should be the name you login as minus the @ sign and the domain name. So if you login as [email protected], your user name on Windows 8 would almost certainly be thisisjustasample.

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  • There I just see my old local username I had before. Seems to be connected to that Microsoft Account now...
    – FiveO
    Oct 22, 2012 at 8:57
  • That sounds right to me. In my case it was a new PC so I didn't have an old account, but after I signed in with my Microsoft account I wound up with a local account of just my first name.
    – Mark Allen
    Oct 22, 2012 at 18:30
  • I’m relaying a comment from an anonymous user who says, “In my case, the name is the first five letters of the login name followed by series of digits; e.g., thisisjustasample became thisi_000.” Mar 12, 2013 at 23:19
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In a clean installation of Windows 8.1, when I associate a Microsoft Account as a user on the local machine, the username is created from the First Name portion of the Display Name of the account with special characters removed. For example, my Display Name is Jason R. Coombs, the First Name portion is Jason R.. As a result, Windows creates the local username as JasonR. The user portion of my e-mail appears to be irrelevant.

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It depends on your configuration; in Netplwiz, you can choose between username_xxx and simply username or the system will manage it automatically.

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  • More information would improve your answer
    – Dave M
    Nov 29, 2015 at 13:52
  • Is there a way to define username by hand? In my case I have Microsoft account "[email protected]" my local username is just first 5 letters and I want "first_name" part.
    – mac
    Dec 3, 2015 at 22:26
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I also found just the first name is the actual username. This is important for certain third-party applications that borrow the login credentials from Windows.

The Windows 8.1 environment NEVER asks for your username. When it shows the 'username' it is in an email address form. This may not be the actual username (as the previous post shows, it may be just the first name portion), which makes figuring out what the heck these third-party applications are looking for... entertaining. I eventually guessed my own, since I had set up my Windows copy only a few weeks earlier, but I am running into this problem at several places. Thanks for the solution.

This reminds me of the obnoxious 'hide extensions for known file types' setting that invited all sorts of mislabeled viruses to get clicked on, which is annoying, useless, and potentially dangerous.

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