Managing User Profiles

A user profile contains all the settings and files for a user’s work environment. In addition to personal documents and media, this includes the user’s own registry settings, view settings used in applications, and such things as cookies and internet favorites.

What’s What and Where in a User Profile

By default, each user who logs on to a computer has a local user profile, which is created when the user logs on for the first time. Local user profiles are stored in %Systemdrive%\Users. Each user’s profile is stored in a subfolder where the user account name is the folder name (for example, C:\Users\Jean). The entire path for the current user’s profile is stored in another commonly used environment variable, %UserProfile%.

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