Now … the person who installed Win11 for you may have only created an Admin account.
It is really not good practice to run under this account for security reasons.
I encourage you to (using the Admin account) to create a normal user account and use that for day-to-day operations. This will mean copying files from the Admin account to the normal account’s %AppData% folders and Documents folders.
I wondered if that was the case because it looks like that from the paths in the file locations doesn’t it? C:\Users|Admin…
I understand creating a normal user account but not entirely sure I understand the ramifications of doing so…I’m about to resume work after days of trying to recover files etc so I would create a new user and from there what happens to my files, settings etc that I see and use now? I don’t quite understand, “This will mean copying files from the Admin account to the normal account’s %AppData% folders and Documents folders”. Does that mean I will have duplicates of everything? Will that affect everything I did yesterday to get the correct file paths in my Sketchup? Sorry if these questions are dumb. I very much appreciate you helping me, I did ask about this yesterday as it was bugging me that I was seeing Admin everywhere.
No problem. We all were dumb once, then learned to speak. First to crawl, then to walk, later to run.
After creating the normal user account using the Admin account.
Log out and then log in to the new user account.
… This will setup all user system folders
Then start SketchUp for the first time on the new account.
… This should initialize SketchUp on that acct to “factory defaults” and create the SketchUp specific %AppData%, %LocalAppData% and %ProgramData% folders.
If you use LayOut, also start LayOut for the first time on the new user account so it also sets up and creates the user resource folders.
Then close SketchUp (and LayOut) and log out of the new user account.
Log back into the Admin account.
If you have shortcuts (keyboard accelerators) already setup, start SketchUp on the Admin account, open the Preferences dialog, go to the Shortcuts panel and export a Preferences.dat file but before saving, click the Options… button and check only shortcuts. (You do not want to save the file locations that are pointing into the Admin user %AppData% path.)
Save the dat somewhere like the Admin “Documents folder”. Then move that over to the Giselle “Documents” folder.
(You’ll import this later using the new user account.) Close SketchUp.
Now, if you do not wish to have duplicate files and subfolders, using administrative privileges, you can move:
model files (and subfolders) from say the “Admin/Documents” to “Giselle/Documents”
materials files from:
repeat for other custom resources like:
If you use LayOut, do the same for the LayOut user data Scrapbooks and Templates folders, moving any custom resources from the Admin user path over to the new user account folders.
So, after all this migration, close applications and log out of the Admin account, and log in to the user account. Check SketchUp and LayOut that you can access your custom user resources.
In SketchUp, open the Preferences dialog, go to the Shortcuts panel and import the Preferences.dat file that you had copied to the user “Documents” folder. This should bring in your shortcuts.
Check that your extensions are loading and working.
What is the sure fire way of figuring out whether I am running as admin or not? I have a bunch of other graphic programs etc, which I assume I would have to do similar things to use?
On Win 11, click the Start button.
The user name for the current account is displayed at the bottom of the menu.
I don’t know what name the person who installed Win 11 on your machine gave to the Admin account.
There might be a 3rd party migration tool that can help create a backup archive to restore user files.
I looked at Microsoft downloads and what they have now is overly complex.
It just seems to me easier to copy from one user AppData and LocalAppData path to another manually.
When I click the start button it’s my name that shows up not admin.
Okay, then this is what “they” entered in the name field when setting up the account.
It is part of the user profile and is distinct from the account name.
To get at Account management:
Right-click the Start button
Choose search
Search for Control Panel
Click it when it appears in the results list
(You may wish to create a shortcut to this panel whilst it is open,
by pinning it. Either to start page, or desktop, whatever.)
In Control Panel, click the User Accounts icon.
I’m not sure where we would edit the user name for an account in the interface.
(I could find out where in the registry to do it, but I’ll not be wanting to have you poking into the registry.)
If you don’t feel comfortable doing these account things, you may need to have an IT person do this for you.