suggestions for managing user profiles 1

[bookouri]

I have 300-400 users who share about a hundred PC's running XP pro on a 2003 Domain. We have started to have problems with PC's crashing due to full hard drives because of all the cached user profiles. If we have a machine that has been in service for a while, hundreds of people may have logged on to it including dozens of employees who are not even here any more. We bought some time by redirecting my documents and other folders to the users network home drives, but I have been told to find a better way even if I have to go to a mandatory roaming profile. I have used a mandatory roaming profile before but that was a long time ago and had some problems with it. I dont need any "enhanced" security or control of the users desktop, all i really need is a way to control those local profiles on the workstations.

does anybody have any suggestions? anybody else having to deal with this same problem?

thanks in advance for any comments.

 

[Zelandakh]

Roaming user profiles with redirected My Docs folders and clear the Temp folders at logon. There are also VB scripts available to remove other profiles if you really need but that might be overkill.

 

[bookouri]

If I just use roaming profiles and not mandatory profiles though, Ill still have to worry about users dragging gigs of files onto their desktop and slowing down their logons I think. I havnt thought much about a script solution because I'd have to worry about running the script with admin rights to delete all those other profiles..

 

[Rockstar101]

I suppose a script would be best to clean up the used profiles taking up valuable space on the individual HDDs.

I would use a Group Policy "Folder Redirection" to keep it transparent to the user when they go to save documents to say, "My Documents" folder.

Zelandakh is right about the clearing of the temp folder which can also be achieved through GPO.

Having a large amt of data on a users desktop won't slow down their logon time - the delay at that point would be caused by group policies being applied to users. Which really shouldn't be noticable because if your running XP they should be running in the backgroud as XP used a "fast logon" process for this.

Good luck!

 

[Zelandakh]

You can redirect the desktop.

 

[bookouri]

ive been experimenting with redirecting the desktop and the other "special" folders. it looks like thats probably going to be my best bet so far.

 

[58sniper]

folder redirection for key folders, like Zelandakh notes, it where you want to look.

You can also use delprof.exe to remove old profiles automatically via a startup script.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[bookouri]

thanks, i need to take a look at delprof... i havnt run across that one before.