Quota

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. One of the problems inherent to roaming user profiles is that they are copied to the local computer during logon. That takes time. Hence the motivation to limit the size of user profiles. One way of doing that is to put a quota on them, another one is folder redirection. Although widely used, redirection has its problems; problems so grave that Shawn Bass started to campaign against using folder redirection altogether. In this article I describe why Shawn despises redirection, which alternatives are available now what we can hope for in the future.

Why does Windows 7 feel faster than Vista, although really it is not? Improvements to the graphics driver model (WDDM got upgraded to version 1.1) certainly add to this feeling and reduce the memory footprint of the desktop windows manager (DWM) process. Microsoft describes the changes in its Graphics Guide for Windows 7.

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. Roaming user profiles tend to grow over time, which is sometimes referred to as profile bloat. In and by itself, profile growth is not a problem. Users of desktop PCs who log on the the same machine every day will not even notice that they have huge profiles ready to follow them around the network. Their locally cached copy of the roaming profile is always current. No need to fetch anything from a file server during logon.

Did you know that Windows Server contains a file system quota component? “Of course”, you will say. It was introduced with Windows 2000 and is completely useless since it only allows for volume-level quotas. That is true, but at the same time, it is nowadays quite irrelevant. With the R2 update to Windows Server 2003 Microsoft finally got it right and introduced the optional component File Server Resource Manager (FSRM). With FSRM, folder-level quotas find their way into the (professional) lives of administrators who do not care for additional third-party filter drivers that are prone to destabilize production servers.