Part II of this series, I outlined the three tabs available from the properties dialog box for a user account. The three tabs include: General, Member Of and Profile. Since the Profile tab has settings that are often overlooked, we’ll now take a close look at them.
The Profile tab allows you to configure the path to the user profile. For those of you who are not familiar with what a user profile is, here is a perfect example that I’m sure most can relate to. Two users share the same computer. One user prefers the Windows default background and the other prefers backgrounds downloaded from the Internet. So what permits each user to retain their preferences on a single computer? Of course, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, the answer is user profiles.
By default profiles are stored on a local computer. What happens though for users who move between multiple workstations? They can configure their settings on each local computer or the easier solution is to use roaming profiles. This way the profiles can be stored on a central computer making the profiles available on any computer in the domain. This is where the Profile tab comes in. Once you’ve created a share on a central computer to hold the profiles, use the Profiles tab under the account properties and type in the path to the shared folder.
Two other fields are available from this property sheet: logon scripts and home folders. If you are using logon scripts, provide the path to where they are located so the scripts can be run each time the user logs on to the computer. Home folders are considered to be a user’s personal storage space. You have the option of storing them on the local computer or on another computer on your network.
[tags]Diana Huggins, Microsoft, Windows, Vista, user account[/tags]
