Technical Assistant Attachment Programme

Sweeping up dirt with my roaming profile

• September 21st, 2007

I thought my own profile need to be way better than the normal student folks. Instead of using the same mandatory profile with the masses, I changed mine to use roaming instead. Wow.. finally I can have my own wallpaper and my own Firefox settings uniquely to my own! Oh the joy of Active Directory!Then..

..as times wear on, I realised that the perfection of a roaming profile is illusionary. True it is good, but only on a perfect world which I don’t live in.

In reality, due to a college’s enviroment, garbage software tends to gunk up pc’s faster than the rev meter on my friend’s car. Usually within hours of a fresh install, I can see garbage like Picasa install on the units. Who the heck uses Picasa on a public computer anyway?!

As such, as my roaming profile goes places when I log in to different pc’s all over the campus, it started collecting junk left by those pesky autoruns and utilities and services that litters my profile with useless settings.

I checked my profile and I saw things like Picasa settings, photoshop settings, mySQL settings, apache settings, java settings, the list goes on. It’s so bad that from my original profile backup which is only 19MB, it’s now a freaking 80MB. Then imagine loading this 80MB from the server everytime you log in.

Yup.. that’s me sitting there still staring at the loading screen. Har har.. very funny.

So now I’m figuring ways of locking down my profile when I don’t want it to collect infomation. I wonder if I can set my personal roaming profile to mandatory while existing on a different folder from the rest of the noobs.

ntuser.man -> ntuser.dat

• previous post