This May, 2006, marks two full years of blogging…well, actually I had a blog or two before this one but that’s two full years of consistency with this blog.
This post makes 133 posts in that full two years. Amazing.
I will say that this effort to post at least once a month has turned into a much more frequent set of writing. I actually manage to get something in here several times a month now.
Good job John, even if I do say so myself.
Create a user named NewDefault
Log into NewDefault
Install TweakUI for XP and adjust settings
Change registry settings for default folder locations (to remote drive)
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Click on the image below to make it legible.
Note the path at the bottom of the image. Open Regedit and go to that key. Note that some of the Data is kept at the default, but that other settings use the %USERNAME% variable along with the path to the other computer.
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Re-log in to NewDefault to be sure it works okay.
Log into Administrator
Copy Application Settings for NewDefault to defaultuser:
Right click on My Computer (you should be in Administrator, not NewDefault) and select Properties
Select Advanced tab, then click on User Profiles settings button
Select the NewDefault setting and click on the Copy to: button
Browse to: c:\Documents and Settings\Default User
Say Okay…
In the “Select to use” section click on the Change button
Type “Everyone” without the quotes in the “Enter the object name…” section
Say Okay to close all the windows.
This will set the default so that any newly created accounts will look the same as the NewDefault user but will have their own folder on the remote drive.
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Now you can go back to NewDefault user login, open regedit, go back to the key and right click on the main category in the left pane. Select Export and save it as a *.reg file on the main computer. Create a batch file using AddUsers.exe to create a NewDefault user on each of the other computers. Copy the *.reg file over to the NewDefault user and click on it to activate the changes in the new computer’s NewDefault registry. Now any new users on that computer will be setup to have their profiles placed on the main computer.
Next step is to create duplicate users on all the other computers…wallah!! Users can move from computer to computer without a server login!!
Warning…this last part is untested.
The AddUsers.exe files can be found at http://www.systemsolver.com/download/Addusers/
This article describes how to move the location of user folderes in XP
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_shell_folders.htm
I had to work on it a lot to make it work. See the entry above for the correct methods.
This Microsoft page describes an executable to add users to Windows. I don’t know if it will work with XP.
This is an excellant list of tweaks.