What do you do with Local Profiles

[Snookered]

I had a pc that became unusable, slow to logon and then incredibly slow to load any programs or explorer/browser windows.

I ran virus and malware checks and nothing was found. What I did find though were hundreds of local profiles for a mixture of staff and pupils up to two years old, most were a couple of hundred megabytes, but there were some massive profiles in there too.

I decided to use Delprof2 to delete those profiles over 30 days old, but then I decided to wipe them all. The pc runs totally different now with no slow downs.

What do you tend to do with machines that have numerous different logons?

I have read online that Local profiles do not slow pc's down, but this isn't the case with this pc.

Also can someone explain the difference between Local and Roaming profiles?

 

Many thanks!

[Joanne]

So a local profile saves all the app data to the C: drive in users\%username%

 

Roaming profiles save app data to the server. Each time you log on the machine has to pull this data across. Basically all of your settings follow you. Desktop background, program settings, outlook settings etc.

 

What I tend to do with local profiles (that's what we have here with folder redirection) is move them to a folder called Old Profiles (JUST INCASE!) then I delete the registry entries in HKLM - Software - Microsoft - Windows NT - Current Version - Profile List.

 

I'm pretty sure there is a group policy that can also remove profiles...

 

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/28647.how-to-automatically-delete-user-profiles-older-than-a-certain-number-of-days-using-group-policy.aspx

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-7/69653-gpo-windows-7-automatically-delete-local-user-profiles-older-than-x-number-days.html

Edited March 22, 2016 by Joanne

[Oaktech]

delprof2 as a scheduled task every 30 days with exclusions for certain profiles - namely mine.

 

Local profiles are a logon profile created by the local machine (either copied from a mandatory profile location, or created at logon according to policy) the settings changed/created on this machine do not move with the user to another machine. Roaming profiles are stored on a network location and are copied to a machine at logon allowing settings created at one machine to appear at another - this has the advantage of allowing profiles to be backed up, and the obvious advantage of being able to move settings with a user, but can substantially increase logon times as the filecopy operation is performed. They are also much more prone to corruption as they are copied to and fro.

[Snookered]

So it sounds like roaming profiles would slow down login times (we don't have roaming profiles and people still moan about long log in times ).

However could hundreds of local profiles slow a pc down?

[Joanne]

Yeah they can. Litters the hard drive. You could defrag machines, but its quicker to just delete them!

 

I wonder if an SSD would have the same problems....

[Oaktech]

So it sounds like roaming profiles would slow down login times (we don't have roaming profiles and people still moan about long log in times ).

However could hundreds of local profiles slow a pc down?

 

Sort of...

 

Lots of profiles take up space, the less space windows has to work with the slower it does stuff. Never quite worked out why.

 

You can tweak things to help login times - creating a mandatory profile helps, as does making sure your GPOs are configured optimally, search for info on how to do those things, making sure your wifi is configured properly and that you have enough of it helps too.

[reprised]

This is something we have been looking at whether we should go roaming or not. We use local profiles and find they work well for us. Our login time is about 30-40s (quicker on ssd PCs) for a new profile and <5s for a profile that is already created. We don't really see a need to change but maybe we are missing out? Someone we had in to talk about a workspace manager told us we are working in an old school way .

[Joanne]

May be old school, but it's functional and efficient 😊

[DGardiner]

roaming profiles with all of the large stuff redirected makes the profile itself tiny our clock in at a few MB

 

since replacing some computers with SSD's i finally realised it wasn't the network/congestion its crap mechanical hard drives!