User Profile Information
In the past the AE labs used "Roaming User Profiles". Beginning April 1, 2008, we've moved to "Local User Profiles" with "Redirected Profile Folders". We've found that Roaming Profiles carrying User Registry Hives would easily become corrupt when software was heavily updated, causing software and network resources to fail.
Local User Profiles create a new user profile each time you log onto a different computer, while Redirected Folders still keep a common Desktop, Documents, and Application Data folder available regardless of where you log on.
One noticable difference is logon and logoff time. Since Redirected Folders do not cache local copies of profile folders, logging on and off is much faster and more reliable than while using Roaming Profiles.
Local User Profiles also allows us to more easily customize software settings for users. For example, by default, AGI will be set to save to the P: drive, instead of your Documents folder, AutoCAD will no longer require the registry key to fix the initial install problem, and VIZ will likely render to the P: drive as well.
The most noticable advantage is reliability. Local User Profiles are historically more reliable than those that roam, and if a user does experience problems on one PC, in most cases the problem is fixed by using a different PC, and if that doesn't help, it's likely a software problem and should be brought to the professor's attention.
One think to keep in mind about Redirected Profile Folders, the limit is 300 MB. Keep in mind also that this space should be used primarily as temporary storage and as a working directory. If this limit is reached you will receive a "Disk Full" error. At that point items should be moved to other storage, P, Y, T, W, U, etc. otherwise software that uses this area for work may not behave as it should.
In the future, we may map a drive letter to the root folder holding the Redirected Profile Folders, R: maybe, but if you wish to map it yourself now, the path would be "\\aep.coeaccess.psu.edu\profiles$\username".
Questions or Comments about your User Profile? Contact Corey Wilkinson