University of California at Berkeley Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences Instructional Support Group /share/b/pub/windowsprofile.help Apr 5, 2011 CONTENTS What are Windows Profiles? How to Manage It Some Technical Details What are Windows Profiles? ------------------------- In Windows acccounts, the user profile stores the custom settings for your desktop and application software as well as any files that you have stored on your desktop. All of that is located in your U:\profile folder. Windows profiles are a cause of problems among many student's accounts. The main problem you will have is that you will exceed the profile quota of 30 MB. The main culprits are usually Eclipse, IBM RSA (also eclipse) Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox. If you have used any of these programs, you may have to clear out the disk cache of the program and reduce the default cache size, or in the case of Eclipse, delete your .eclipse folder and relocate the workspace to your U:\ drive. The other main culprit is you, the user, placing large files on the Desktop or in My Documents. Files on the Desktop and My Documents count against your profile quota. Because Microsoft copies your profile from the server to the local machine and back, if you put large files in your profile space, you slow down your login and logout. How to Manage It ---------------- Here's where you need to look when the OS complains about your profile: The short answer: Delete the files. The profiles are located in C:\Documents and Setting\\ For cs169-aa is would be in C:\Documents and Settings\cs169-aa Delete the files that you find there. If it's data you wish to save, move it to your U:\ drive. Here's what you need to do to prevent this: ECLIPSE You will need to put your workspace in C:\temp or U:\ when you start Eclipse. U:\ is a better place for it. C:\temp is accessible by anyone and everyone. The .eclipse folder that the popup complains about is in C:\Documents and Settings\\.eclipse. (For cs169-aa, it would be C:\Documents and Settings\cs169-aa\.eclipse) The simplest thing to do is to select the folder and delete it. Make sure you empty your recycling bin too. MOZILLA and NETSCAPE (This applies to your unix accounts too.) Go to Edit-->Preferencee Choose the Advanced Tab. Click on Cache Change the cache to 5 MB, or less, instead of the standard 50MB Click on Clear Cache. Click OK. Firefox (This applies to your unix accounts too.) Reduce their Firefox default cache: Open Firefox -> Tools -> Advanced -> Network -> Offline Storage Check: Override automatic cache management Limit Cache to 5MB of space Click: Clear Now Look inside My Documents\Downloads folder for the files to delete. Some Technical Details ---------------------- For those who wish to understand profiles: Roaming profiles are used to allow you to keep your personal settings when you log onto different machinee. The problem with roaming profiles is that Microsoft wants everyone to dump everything in the profile. Your Desktop is part of your profile. Everything in "My Documents" is part of your profile. Your personal "Temp" Folder is part of your profile. The advantage of this is that your programs and settings follow you from machine to machine. The disadvantage is that the program then takes up precious disk space and time to copy back and forth. The Windows profiles are copied from the server to the local drive and placed in C:\Documents and Settings\ folder from your U:\profile folder. When you log out of the system, the profile gets copied bock to the U:\profile folder. If you put a 500 MB file on your desktop it will be copied to the local disk drive whenever you log in. It will be copied back to the server whenevery you log out. If the file was 500 MB, it will take more than a few minutes to log in on a slow and busy network. This is the reason we set a profile size limit. Never put any large file on your desktop. Put it in your U: drive and create a shortcut (or Link) to it on your desktop. This will solve the problem of the Profile quota being exceeded. This will solve your slow log in and log out times as well. Unfortunately, Microsoft's shortcuts only work through the GUI. Most third party programs see it as a separate file, not a shortcut or link as Unix systems have done. Older systems had much smaller disk drives which causes a problem when too many users have logged into the same machine. With roaming profiles, we can control this by forcing the profile to be deleted from the disk drive when you log out. We do this with all accounts that we create. Unfotunately, other users from the department regularly use our systems and they do not use roaming profiles, they use local profiles. Local profiles can not be automatically be deleted. They are created anew on each machine. Local profile settings do not follow you to another system. They don't get deleted because the user's settings will get deleted. Why don't I see this problem with IE or Word? Microsoft's own programs gets around using disk space in the profile folders by compressing everything in their own format. You could have 10 thousand Cookies or Cached Links in IE, but they don't take up much space compared to Firefox or Mozilla. They also store much of the data in the registry. Guess what! The registry settings are in a file in on the U:\ drive, not in U:\profile so it does not count towards your profile space, but it does use up your total disk quota. It also gets copied back and forth when you log in and log out. Why doesn't Firefox and Mozilla do the same thing? Well if they did, you could not easily transfer settings between Unix and Windows. They'd have to completely rewrite the Windows branch of code. Microsoft might change the format again, forcing a complete rewrite, causing delays for a product that competes with Microsoft. EECS Instructional Support 378/386 Cory, 333 Soda inst@eecs.berkeley.edu