Windows XP User Profiles are MASSIVE!

[joshjacklin]

Hey,
Im wondering if anyone has an idea that can help me on this ive checked some of the other posts on here and its still foggy, im setting up a laptop and i have joined it to our domain and everything is ok apart from the local administrators profile is absolutely massive.

I have not got hardly anything in there but its like 2gb which is trivial but then if you copy the profile over all of the subsequent profiles are going to be roughly the same size which is going to be pretty taxing over a long period of time, I expect the size of a large stuffed profile to be a few hundred meg, we use local profiles to the machine on the policy, and I just am not sure of what I can do.

any help would be really appreciated,

Thank You

[tech_guy]

Hanv you inadvertently left some exe's or suchlike in My Documents, Desktop, etc when setting up the machine? And I always use CCleaner just before I copy the profile across to get rid of the crud and the hive cleanser as well.

[joshjacklin]

Yeah, theres nothing of the sort in either locations the desktop are literally mr computer, my documents and recycle bin, the default home area is empty. Im not too sure what you mean about the hives though?

[tech_guy]

Have you got hibernation turned on - that's a cause of big images as well.

[Chunky]

copy your profile elsewhere, and recreate it from clean. Then check the size

Chunks

[djh]

Try windirstat. It will show the distribution of files and what folder they are in. Then you can pinpoint the folder and the file(s) causing the problem.
Dan

[joshjacklin]

thats an awsome program thanks yeah i see whats taking up all the space, its a program which they insisted needed to be installed. but thank you everyone

[localzuk]

One thing I am finding that manages to fill up profiles, for anyone interested, is RealPlayer. I've found the RealPlayer folder in the Application Data folder can hit upto a GB in size sometimes. Just something to watch out for.

[djh]

No probs.

[link470]

Try windirstat. It will show the distribution of files and what folder they are in. Then you can pinpoint the folder and the file(s) causing the problem.
Dan

Hahaha, beat me to it! I saw the title of this thread and was going to come to post exactly what you just said. WinDirStat is absolutely a must have tool. I use it either for trimming down my default profile sizes, or for scanning the root of our student shares folders to see who has the most stuff. The greatest part about it is you can SO easily pinpoint things like games that students have tried to hide in a folder like Student>Science>Assignments>Homework>1>2>3>4>5>6>. .... and then their "game.exe". Pop open WinDirStat and no more playing with "combination" folders or whatever they want to come up with that took them hours to make. You see the file in less than a second as a big blob on their home drive Busted

One thing I am finding that manages to fill up profiles, for anyone interested, is RealPlayer. I've found the RealPlayer folder in the Application Data folder can hit upto a GB in size sometimes. Just something to watch out for.

I prefer not to use Real Player at all. I use Real Alternative which embeds the Real Player codecs into your system for playing things like .rm files and creates either file associations for Windows Media Player or Media Player Classic from what I remember [comes with Media Player Classic]. Fantastic program, fraction of the size, fraction of the issues

[Edu-IT]

I prefer not to use Real Player at all. I use Real Alternative which embeds the Real Player codecs into your system for playing things like .rm files and creates either file associations for Windows Media Player or Media Player Classic from what I remember [comes with Media Player Classic]. Fantastic program, fraction of the size, fraction of the issues

There was questions on another forum as to the legality of this. Anyone?

[link470]

There was questions on another forum as to the legality of this. Anyone?

I see that question a lot too. I haven't found a confirmed answer yet but versions of the software have continued to be distributed for free and advertised as freeware. I don't use Quicktime Alternative cause I actually like Quicktime, but Real Player I find is awful for the amount of stuff it installs. Older versions of the software even broke certain windows components lol.

[Arthur]

There was questions on another forum as to the legality of this. Anyone

Real Networks do not allow the use of their DLLs in other applications, especially unofficial ones like Real Alternative. The following is an excerpt from the RealPlayer EULA.

1. GRANT OF LICENSE. RN hereby grants to you a non-exclusive license to use the Software and any related documentation ("Documentation") subject to the following terms:

b) The Software may include certain plug-in components ("Plug-Ins"), including the ActiveX Control, Java plug-in, and RA XTRA plug-in. You may only call to or otherwise use such Plug-Ins through the use of the realplay, rcansplg.so.6.0, rpnp.so, rpnphelper, rcaembed.so.6.0, rcacore.so.6.0, realplay.exe, nppl3260.dll, rmoc3260.dll, embd3260.dll, rpcl3260.zip, tpasdk.dll, teasdk.dll, tsystray.exe, teamp3.dll, tsasdk.dll, security.dll, or tpdmgr.dll applications. Any direct use of Plug-Ins through a non-RN proprietary application, including a custom or user-written application is prohibited by this Agreement.

[djh]

We used K-Lite codec pack as it plays pretty much everything you every need to! We find that alot of the music composition software seems to take up alot of space, once the profile was 5GiG!
We've use a mandatory profile now for students which seems to sort that issue.

Dan