Monthly Archives: July 2016

Thing 15: Weeding and Housekeeping H drive and roaming profile

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Analysing your H Drive

If you get one of those emails to tell you your Home folder is full you will be forced down a path of deleting some files.  But how do you know what is hogging the space?

There is a clever little utility on all campus managed PCs that does this for us.  Here’s how to get to it.

  • Click on the start menu
  • Click the Shield
  • Click Analyse my H Drive
  • Go and make a cup of tea/coffee/talk to a colleague for a few minutes.

Once it has finished have a look at the tree map it produces.  You can identify folders taking up most space. Here’s an insight into mine:treemap

Clicking on the largest purple blob, will take you to the name and location of the file. I can quickly see that this is in fact a video (mp4)

northernbridge

And I know from the filename that it’s something that is now on ReCap, so there is absolutely no reason for me to have it.  Then, just right click on the filename and delete it. (If you are really, really sure select Delete (no way to undelete).

nowaytoundelete

WindirStat can be used to examine other file locations too, like shared drives, project filestore and roaming profiles… but more of this later……

Roaming Profiles

Chances are even if you haven’t filled your H drive you will have had a “Profile Over Quota” message.  (If you haven’t seen this, you can simulate it really easily by copying a really large file like the uni powerpoint template to your desktop)

Roaming profiles are a brilliant thing… they give us the ability to go to any PC on campus and still access the same mapped drives, internet shortcuts and application settings.  Your profile is read when you logon to a PC and it is written back to the profile server when you logoff.  When you launch programs for the first time they typically create a new folder in your profile.

Having a look at your roaming profile

The contents of your roaming profile can be found by opening Windows Explorer and going to:

C:\users\<yourcampusid>\AppData\roaming
(eg if your campus id is nfb99 you would type:  c:\users\nfb99\appdata\roaming)

Open this up…You will probably see folders for Adobe, Microsoft, and Google – these hold your settings for Adobe Reader, Microsoft Office, programs in your start menu and Chrome.

Profile Clutter

Your profile can easily get cluttered ……..

  • Following an upgrade to Office 13 your profile may contain information for the new and old versions of office.
  • If you use an application on a different PC, you could then have its bits in your profile. (This in particular is a hazard for those regularly using strange apps on cluster machines!).
  • You may have profile folders for applications you no longer use
  • You may have indavertently saved files to your desktop (do use shortcuts instead)

Deleting Profile Clutter

Let’s take the example of Microsoft Office, try this:

  • Open the folder: C:\Users\<yourcampusid>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Office

You should see a folder here for “15.0” (office 2013)

office15

If you have folders for earlier versions – you can safely delete these – just right click and select delete.

What to do if your profile is over Quota

There are some helpful instructions here in the IT Service article on Profile Over Quota.

If you find the scrolling box a bit too annoying – have a look in the advanced bit below….

Starting from Scratch (Zapping your Profile)

If you are really struggling you can ring the  IT Service to delete your profile from the profile server.  (The nice IT Service people will talk you through this and ask you to logout before they wipe it).

A few more advanced things ….

Another way to weed your profile

We can use Windirstat – but let’s launch it a different way – we are going to create a custom shortcut our desktop for this.

  • From Windows Explorer navigate to c:\program files\cmdinfo\
  • Locate the file windirstat.exe
  • right click on it and select create shortcut (say yes to put the shortcut on your desktop).

Now, go to your desktop and right click on the shortcut you have just created and select properties. We’re going to give it a couple of parameters.

In the target box you’ll see

“C:\Program Files\CMDInfo\windirstat.exe”

  • Add a couple of bits to the end of this line so that the shortcut shows your profile space.

“C:\Program Files\CMDInfo\windirstat.exe” %appdata% /treemap

  • Click OK
  • Rename the shortcut to something that makes sense eg “My Roaming Profile.”

Double click on your shortcut to visualise the space used in your roaming profile.

Avoiding Blowing Your Profile

If you are beleaguered by full profile messages then it is worth getting in touch with the IT Service.

  • If you know what program is causing the problems you can run a script to exclude a particular application from your roaming profile (VideoScribe is a particular culprit)
  • More drastically, if you really only ever use one PC it is possible to save all your settings locally rather than to and from the profile server.  (But this requires a policy to be added to your local PC).

Thing 14: Staying safe online – spotting suspicious emails, viruses, and scams

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We all have emails that get through to us from time to time which we might have some doubts about, and a small proportion of those even look genuine (!). We have all seen the messages that come out from NUIT to all staff when someone has opened an email which contained a virus….. but how do we recognise those rogue emails? And how do we stop ourselves from clicking on something that might turn out to be malicious and result in our identity being used fraudulently?

How do I know if an email is spam, a scam or contains a virus?

In the development of the forthcoming Cyber Security: Safety at Home, Online, in Life free online course, we have, in our little office, become even more acutely aware of the increasing sophistication of our online adversaries. There is a lot of brief and helpful  guidance available. Here are a couple of pointers:

Many of these scams are about criminals trying to get more information about you – including personal details like bank card and account details. This can lead to identity fraud.

Have you been or do you know anyone who has been a victim of identity fraud?

CIFAS has been doing a lot of work to raise awareness of identity fraud.

Watch this film about how easy it is to piece together details of people from something as simple as buying a coffee:

What surprised you?

There is an online fraud risk profiler to assess how at risk you are. Have a go at it.

Will you do anything differently as a result?

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has a really good page on Identity Theft with advice on what to do if you have been a victim.

I want to learn more!

There will be more advice on managing your online professional profiles in a forthcoming thing, and on how you can manage your campus desktop, email and general electronic housekeeping soon.

In the meantime here are a few online courses which may be of interest:

 

Thing 13: Team Top Tips on Saving Stuff

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This week’s problem:

  • After a lengthy Google Search you find a gem of information
  • A colleague sends you a brilliant link or tip in an email

What do you do with these? How do you ensure that you can find them again when you need them?

With a trusty notebook and pen I pestered LTDS colleagues for ideas…

Bookmarks

Lynsey suggested bookmarks as “saving stuff 101”.

Look for the Star on the IE or Chrome address bar.  If you want to move to the next league you can organise these into folders.  (see Chrome instructions and IE instructions)

My Bookmarks on the Staff Homepage

Have you spotted “Customise My Bookmarks” on the Staff Homepage?  No longer any need to trawl for ages to find the list of active purchasing agreements etc.

Try adding a hard-to-find-University-page as a bookmark – it will take a jiffy and you can even modify the order.  (Carol is our resident expert.)

OneNote

Janice and Carol were keen to include OneNote on our list of great tools.  You may even remember that we had a look at OneNote back in Thing 3.  Carol points out that it works well with other Office Products — I didn’t know that you can  move an email straight to OneNote. Here’s how it goes:

https://youtu.be/-V_hiKHPqr0

And you can email stuff to OneNote notebooks too. And there is a webclipper for Chrome.  And… can you tell I really like OneNote?

Evernote

Evernote is a third party tool that synchronises notes you take between your PC, Mac, tablet, phone.  You need to signup to create an account and it can be used free as long as you only want to use the App on two devices – still OK for most people.  Some of the really neat things about it are:

  • it works really well on a smartphone (OneNote is a bit clunky on phones).
  • text on photos you add to Evernote becomes searchable –  it scans and OCRs the photos for you.  (Yes it does work on photos of business cards!)
  • It is very easy to use – for proof see this much more professionally produced video.

Social Bookmarking Tools (Delicious and Diigo)

How about if you want to share web bookmarks with a bunch of colleagues involved in similar work? For this Graeme suggests a tool like Delicious.  You have to create a free account, and add a bookmarklet to your browser (no need for admin rights to do this thankfully).

Then you can get cracking adding links to Delicious.  You can share your links, as Graeme has done, search other user’s links and follow other people.

Diigo is a similar tool, also giving you a publically visible list (see this list from The Enterprise Shed). We’ve also had a go at presenting some of these links in a more organised manner using Diigo’s Outliner feature.

Other Strategies

Our colleagues suggested:

  • Email the link to yourself (but put something useful in the email other than “useful link”)
  • “Just remember it”
    (you know who you are.. youth must be on your side!)

So, have I missed anything?  If so add it to the comments.  Try out one or more of these ideas and let us know how you got on.