Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Profiles

A roaming profile is one of three types of user profiles. The other two are local profile, and mandatory profile. A roaming profile allows you as a computer user in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department to keep the same personal preferences regardless of which lab computer you log in to. Your personal preferences include things like your desktop background, My Documents folder, start menu items, and icons.

Moreover, your personal preferences include more specific information like your toolbar settings in Microsoft Word, your page setup in Microsoft Excel, and your web browser settings such as cookies, favorites, and temporary internet files in Internet Explorer. All roaming profiles are stored on a server. Each time you log on to a lab computer, your roaming profile is loaded onto that computer.
 
When you log off any changes that were made to your personal preferences are saved as the profile gets stored back on the server. 

Although it is nice to have a roaming profile, it comes with a small drawback, which is the time it takes to do the loading and storing of your profile. The amount of time this takes depends on the size of your profile. Some of the largest contributors to the size of your profile are temporary internet files, and any files which are saved directly to the desktop.

One way to reduce profile size and speed up your logon time is to empty out the temporary internet files folder before you log off. Another way is to make sure that all data or files you want to save are saved in the memory space available to you through your account. Do not save data or files on the desktop.

Empty Temporary Internet Files in Internet Explorer:

1. Select Internet Options from the Tools menu.
2. To delete files click on Delete Files.
3. To delete cookies click on Delete Cookies.

A little more about profiles

A local profile is kept on one computer, but that computer can have many users. This means that one computer can have many different local profiles. So when different people use the same computer, each user can change their settings and it will not affect other user's settings.

A mandatory profile is one that is made the same for all users. This means that every user has the same settings and cannot make changes to them.