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Non Roaming Mandatory Profiles

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by kwoerner

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On a NT or 2000 workstation, is there a way to make a local profile into a mandatory profile without it roaming. Please read the situation below for a better understanding.

I work in a school and most work stations are w98se. However, I do haveseveral NT and 2000 workstations. These cause my problems. Whenever a student logs onto one of these, they, or a lab manager, has to set up their internet connection and printer. When they move to another NT station, it has to be done again. Plus, tons of local profiles are built up, wasting disk space.

The reason I don't want roaming profiles is that most of these machines are in a lab and are task specific. When a profile roams, the start menu and desktop also follow. This leads to problems because, as the students move from one lab workstation to another in the course of a semester, the wrong desktops, start menus, etc. follow them around. They also follow them to other NT or 2000 machines on the network. This creates major headaches.

Basically, is their any way to make NT and 2000 act more like a w98se machine regarding user profiles. I would convert them all to 98, but unfortunately this lab software requires NT or 2000.

All help is greatly appreciated.

9 replies

by ntoz

You could modify the default user profile using tools such as policy editor on the local system. In modifying the default user profile, when a user would logon for the first time, they would get a copy of the the default user, thus the pre-defined requirements you choose. If a user doesnt have a profile path defined in the NT domain this is the way it works by defualt. To answer your problem in reguards to roaming profiles being localy cached, you can set registry to not save roaming profiles.

Pete

by larry23

You could do it simply with roaming profiles;

I have a similar core lab set up in a kiosk environment, all containing NT/2000 systems. On my NT server, I have a default profile that has the desktop environment as well as all the printers on the print server. When I create a new user, no matter which NT/2000 machine they log onto, they inherit this profile. These settings that are provided in the default profile are written back to the Users profile when they log off. So when they log on to anew machine, the settings follow the user - incl. printers

Each NT machine has somewhat of a specific task. I set up the All User profile on each with the appropriate Start Menu items (programs). When a user logs on, they will be provided with the start menu settings of that machine, including IE5 to provide automatic Internet connectivity.

When a user moves to a different machine, those All User items do not roam with the users roaming profile. Therefore, when they log onto another machine in the lab, they will have that machine?s All User profile containing specific applications. Nothing will be inherent from the previous machine with the exception of their roaming profile. When I initially set up IE5, I locked out features like writing temporary internet files back to disk and limiting the History file to a couple of days - A huge savings of both time and disk space.

With system policies, you can further lock your systems down. You can prevent directories from roaming with a profile - like Internet files, the Personal Directory, or even Desktop directory. You can have cached roaming profiles deleted from your NT machines when a user logs off to eliminate wasted space, and, most importantly, you can limit the size of profiles.

Good Luck!

by Former member

I think what your describing is mandatory profile on the local PC. This can be done, however I would recommend using a local policy as well. That way your kids want mess up your desktop as well as other settings. I'm currently using this in our libraries and Sheriff's Dept and it works well. I recommend setting up your mandatory profile and then load poledit.exe on each computer you want to lock. Instead of trying write all of this I?ll give you the URL that has all the information you need to set this up. This is a Microsoft site that has a lot of good information specific to your situation. The site URL is www.microsoft.com/TechNet/winnt/Winntas/Planning/prof_pol.asp
I used this site to get the same information that you need. It works really well. I hope that this will be helpful. Good Luck

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