What is a "reasonable" size for my profile?
What can I do to reduce the size of my profile to speed my login/logout time?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q: Why does it take a long time for me to login
and logout of the computers at the Bren School?
A: Your account at the Bren School uses a "Roaming Profile."
This profile stores things like your email settings, shortcuts and/or
files on your desktop, files cached by MS Internet Explorer, custom
screen backgrounds that you use, some application settings, the location
of your network home directory, and so forth. When you login to a machine
at the Bren School your profile is downloaded from the server to the
machine at which you are sitting. When you logoff your profile (along
with any changes) is uploaded to the server. So, using large background
images, storing files on your desktop (including the "My Documents"
folder), and your internet cached files can result in a very large profile
which takes a long time to download or upload when you are logging on
or off of computers in the lab.
Q: What is considered a "reasonable"
size for my roaming profile?
A: Your roaming profile should generally be between 1 and 5 Megabytes
(MB). You can check the size of your roaming profile by doing the following:
Start Windows NT explorer by right-clicking on the "Start"
button and select "Explore". This will start the explorer
in your local profile directory. Right-click on the folder that matches
username, and select "Properties" (e.g. if my name is George
Smith, and my username is gsmith, then I wuuld right-click on the folder
called gsmith). The "Size" value will tell you how large this
folder is (note that it may take a while to "count" all of
the files if your profile is large).
Q: What can I do to reduce the size of my roaming
profile so that my login/logout time doesn't take as long?
A: There are a number of steps that you can take to help reduce your
profile:
Make sure that your Internet Explorer "cached file" settings are set to only store 1MB of files. To do this, start MS Internet Explorer, select "Options" from the "Tools" menu. Press the "Settings" button on the "General" tab in the "Temporary Internet files" box. Set the "Amount of disk space to use" in the "Temporary Internet files folder" to one (1) MB. Press OK.
Only store a few days of "History" in Internet Explorer. To do this, start MS Internet Explorer, select "Options" from the "Tools" menu. Change the "Days to keep pages in history" to something between 1 and 5 days. Also press the "Clear History" button.
Don't use custom screen backgrounds. You can remove your custom screen background by right-clicking on the desktop and selecting "Properties..." Then select the "Background" tab and select "(None)" in both the "Pattern" box, and the "Wallpaper" box. Then press OK.
Despite the settings that you have made above, Windows will often store more files that you have asked it to. Another thing that you can do periodically is "clear out" your history and cached internet files manually. To do this, you need to: Start Windows NT explorer by right-clicking on the "Start" button and select "Explore". This will start the explorer in your local profile directory. Select "Options" from the "View" menu. Select "Show all files" on the "View" tab, and deselect the "Hide file extensions for known file types." Press OK. Click on the "+" next to "Temporary Internet Files" in your profile folder, and then click on the "+" next to the "Content.IE5" folder. Delete all sub-folders of the Content.IE5 folder by selecting the folder in the left-hand pane and pressing the delete key (answer "yes" and "yes to all" to the dialog boxes that appear). NOTE: you should change the "Show all files" and "Hide file extensions for known file types" in Windows NT Explorerback to their original settings when you are done with this clean-up process.
Check to make sure you aren't storing large files on your desktop or in your profile. You should be storing all of your files in your network home directory (the "H:\username" network disk). It's OK to have "shortcuts" to files stored in your H: drive on your desktop, but you shouldn't have the actual files stored on your desktop. To check for files in the "Desktop" and/or "Personal" folders of your profile. (Start Windows Explorer as in step 4 above).