How Can I Rename a Local User Account on a Windows XP Computer?

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Hey, Scripting Guy! How can I rename a local user account on a Windows XP computer?

— TY

Hey, TY. You know, nowadays the “in” thing is to poke fun at Microsoft and Windows XP. We know: we’ve seen the new commercials from that one computer company. (Remember, the computer company that used to be good, a long time ago?) But as much as we Scripting Guys would like to be thought of as cool we’re not going to make fun of Windows XP today; in fact, we’re going to sing its praises. Is that because Microsoft signs our paycheck? Well, OK, sure. But in addition to that, Windows XP (and Windows Server 2003) makes it possible for you to use a script to rename local user accounts. That might not be cool, but it is useful.

Which is almost as good.

Here – in all its uncool glory – is the script we came up with:

strComputer = “.”

Set objWMIService = GetObject(“winmgmts:\\” & strComputer & “\root\cimv2”)
Set colAccounts = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
    (“Select * From Win32_UserAccount Where LocalAccount = True And Name = ‘kmyer'”)
For Each objAccount in colAccounts
    objAccount.Rename “kenmyer”
Next

The first thing you might have noticed about this script is that it uses WMI instead of ADSI. Wait a second, you’re thinking: don’t the Scripting Guys always tell us to use ADSI when it comes to managing users and groups? Yes, we do, and that’s exactly what you should do … most of the time. Renaming local user accounts happens to be a rare exception, however. With ADSI you need to use the MoveHere method to rename user accounts. That’s fine, except for the fact that MoveHere only works for domain accounts; if you try renaming a local user account you’ll get the much-beloved “unspecified error” error message. The unspecified error: you can’t use MoveHere to rename a local user account.

Fortunately, though, you can use WMI to rename local user accounts, provided you’re running Windows XP or Windows Server 2003. Why just those two versions of Windows? That’s because those are the only versions in which the Win32_UserAccount class includes the Rename method. You can’t use WMI to rename local user accounts on a Windows 2000 computer because the Rename method doesn’t exist in Windows 2000.

And, no, at this point in time there’s probably no chance that this capability will be added to Windows 2000.

But you don’t care about that do you, TY, because you specifically asked about performing this task on a Windows XP computer. With that in mind, let’s examine the code in a little more detail, beginning with the fact that the script starts out by connecting to the WMI service on the local computer. What if the account we wanted to rename happens to reside on a remote computer? No problem; just set the value of the variable strComputer to the name of the remote machine.

Ah, come on: that’s at least kind of cool, isn’t it? Well, some of the Scripting Moms thought it was kind of cool.

After making the connection to the WMI service we next encounter this line of code:

Set colAccounts = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
    (“Select * From Win32_UserAccount Where LocalAccount = True And Name = ‘kmyer'”)

What we’re doing here is retrieving a collection of all the user accounts that we want to rename. Of course, there’s only one account we want to rename: the local account kmyer. Hence our Where clause, which asks the script to “select all the accounts where the value of the LocalAccount property is true (meaning this is a local account rather than a domain account) and where the account Name is equal to kmyer.” Because account names must be unique on a computer, that means this query will return, at most, a single item.

Believe it or not we’re almost done. All we have left to do is set up a For Each loop to cycle through all the items in the collection. Inside the loop we use the Rename method to rename the user account, in this case changing the account name to kenmyer:

For Each objAccount in colAccounts
    objAccount.Rename “kenmyer”
Next

That’s it: just like that the account will be renamed. The next time Ken Myer logs on to the local computer he’ll need to log on as kenmyer rather than kmyer.

And, yes, you can indeed use this script to rename the local Administrator account. For example, this revised code renames the Administrator account to NotAdministrator:

strComputer = “.”

Set objWMIService = GetObject(“winmgmts:\\” & strComputer & “\root\cimv2”)
Set colAccounts = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
    (“Select * From Win32_UserAccount Where LocalAccount = True And Name = ‘Administrator'”)
For Each objAccount in colAccounts
    objAccount.Rename “NotAdministrator”
Next

Now that is cool!

Come to think of it, you don’t suppose anyone would be interested in a commercial about using scripts to rename local user accounts, do you? Good point. But there’s probably not much chance we could get Microsoft to spring for a bunch of bikini- and/or Speedo-clad extras.

ScriptingGuy1

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