Downsides of pupils not having profile (man or roaming)

[Kyle]

What are the downsides of a pupil not having a profile configured. I have always used a mandatory profile. I read other stay away from roaming for pupils and some don't. I know from reading on here that others may use a super mandatory profile.

 

I wondered what the downsides of not having a profile at all configured are?

[Guest Guest]

I cant think of any. If you ask any teacher what would you prefer, kids to have personalised desktops/settings causing them to have wrongly/none-standard setting in apps or for them to be logged on quickly, then im sure i know the answer.

 

Id be interested to find out if there are any disadvantages but i cant for the life of me think of any myself.

[FN-GM]

I can't think of any for Mandatory, they keep all desktops the same, log quick & don't take space on the server. With roaming profiles they could become very large and logins could be longer & it would also take-up more space on the server.

 

Z

[joe90bass]

In my experience roaming = slow logon! I remember our previous head of IT moaning that one day it took him a lesson to logon at our lower school site, when I checked his desktop was 1gb and his profile was in upper school, I think at the time we had a 2MB link between the two...............

[MkII]

For kids a vanilla profile means a different setup on every PC they visit. Surely a bad thing.

[CyberNerd]

wondered what the downsides of not having a profile at all configured are?

 

suppose you just installed an application on a network share or published it on a webserver - how do you get the links to the desktops without a (mandatory) profile

[FN-GM]

I know this one, folder Re-direction

 

Z

[CyberNerd]

nice one, I've been living in Citrix land too long

[FN-GM]

[andyrite]

I found a thread on here getting local profiles to work. I've set it up and the students don't have a roaming profile. Logins are now a lot faster.

 

I've got a profile with all the application settings on a network share. A startup script copies them down to the default user directory on the local c drive.

[Gatt]

We don't use Mandatory or Roaming.

Our kids desktops are all controlled through GPO's and we use Folder Redirection on their Start menus, Desktops and Home Folders

 

Their Profiles are locked down tighter than a Gnat's Arse, and get deleted each time the PC reboots (delprof.exe) and a Kix Script deals with printer and drive mappings, as well as the desktop BG

 

This works very well for us, and logon times are reasonably quick

I say reasonably, cos our network is pants and is in need of re-cabling in areas..

[projector1]

For kids a vanilla profile means a different setup on every PC they visit. Surely a bad thing.

 

we handle this by using GPO folder redirection

[Dos_Box]

Indeed. As said my preferance is for GPO's and folder re-direction. Using profiles just murks the waters in an already murky enviroment.

[Kyle]

found a thread on here getting local profiles to work. I've set it up and the students don't have a roaming profile. Logins are now a lot faster.

 

I've got a profile with all the application settings on a network share. A startup script copies them down to the default user directory on the local c drive.

 

 

Have you go tany more info on this andy?

[craiglay]

Surely with no profile specified, the system will create a new one from scratch each time a user logs on, which takes extra time.

 

In most schools I use mandatory profiles, with some non specified. Teachers have full roaming profiles (which are a pain)

 

I've been toying with laptops, and having a copy of the mandatory profile on the local drive, and in the AD profile settings pointing to the local mandatory profile. The pain will be updating them though. My reason is just to reduce network traffic when the laptops log on though.

 

 

Craig

[andyrite]

Heres my setup:-

 

I've created a users profile as I wanted. Make sure all the windows and office settings are correct. I did this on a machine thats not in the domain.

Copied the folder from "c:\documents and settings" for the user I just setup onto the network.

I made a folder in netlogon called profiles.

 

Put this script into your machines startup script.(GPO)

 

NET USE X: \\server\netlogon /persistent:no

x:\delprof.exe /q /i

x:\robocopy.exe x:\Profiles\Standard\ "c:\documents and settings\Default User" /MIR

net use /delete * /y

 

 

Make sure delprof and robocopy are in the netlogon folder.

 

If you have a lot of profiles on the c drive, the first time you run this the machine will stick at running startup scripts for ages.

Any changes you need to make to the user profile only has to be copied to one place. The machine will copy any changes when it reboots.

There should be very little network traffic as robocopy is only checking for changes and the user aren't pulling down their profile when they log on.

 

I use folder redirection for the desktop, start menu and home drives.

 

This was posted by someone else, i've just tweaked it a bit.

[KarlGoddard]

And another vote for GPO's and redirection.

 

Works very well indeed!

[maniac]

How do you manage settings for programs like Office (stop the initial start up questions) IE7 (same) Media player 11 (same) and other programs that store settings in the profile? Our mandatory profile we use at the moment has all these programmed into it, so we can't move away from it while this is the case.

 

I would really like to speed up our students login time, as at the moment it is around 50-60 seconds which according to staff is too slow! It's also a lot slower over the wireless system as it takes a while to copy the mandatory profile down each time.

 

What does everyone else do for these type of settings?

 

Mike.

[SimpleSi]

@andyrite

 

I like the look of your method

 

Copied the folder from "c:\documents and settings" for the user I just setup onto the network.

 

How copied - simple copy/ xcopy/ robocopy?

 

Do you change any permissions?

 

regards

 

Simon

[andyrite]

I've got a machine setup thats got all the software installed but not joined to the domain. I created a local user and setup the machine as i wanted. Then logout and login as the local administrator. You then should be able to copy the users profile out of the "c:\documents and settings folder". I renamed it to standard and copied it to the profile directory on the network.

 

I didn't change any permissions. With Ranger the logon times are about 30secs on a fast machine.

[jake76]

If you use profiles (Mandatory or Roaming) how do you deal with issues like different versions of Office in different suites?

 

I've ended up setting up the local default user profile ready configured with Office2000/XP/2003/etc. depending on what version is on that image.

 

Sometimes combined with delprof to keep the numbers of profiles on a computer down.

 

Also maybe of interest is putting a default user profile into the netlogon share on the server. The local computer looks there before looking at the local default user profile if a manadatory/roaming profile isn't specified.

[andyrite]

The reason I haven't put the default user on the netlogon share is network traffic. It is much quicker to pull the default from the local drive than the network.

Using robocopy it only copies the file if it's changed.

 

I'm running office 2003 all over so i don't have that issue. You could create a few more OU's with different startup scripts pulling the correct profile from the network. Then just stick the correct machines in the right OU.

[djm968]

The only obvious downside is personal "Favourites" but there are many ways to resolve this and I usually write VBScript to deal with this via GPO at logon and logoff.

[MkII]

Surely with local profiles you get hard disks filling up with all the individual profiles stored on there??

[djm968]

Surely with local profiles you get hard disks filling up with all the individual profiles stored on there??

 

Own up…. who mentioned that terrifying phrase “local profiles!” that would be just insane….. or dare I say it suicidal!