Moving and Shaking
Right. It gets technical now.
It seems my problems at work where my laptop takes an age to sign-on is due to it making a copy of your profile onto our LAN. For “roaming” purposes. Therefore the more you have in your profile folder, the longer it takes.
So I set about reducing this down. And in the process, I came across a number of useful workarounds and general tips.
As part of this (because IE puts its temporary files in your profile folder) I’ve created a “Temporary Files” folder on C:\ (both at home and at work) where I’m trying to get as many apps as possible to put their cache, temporary folders and general bog.
So far I’ve found that I can move IE Temp Files, Firefox Cache, OpenOffice Temporary Files and Java Temporary files. All in a single neat folder, out of the way.
Oh, the reason I’m doing this at home as well, is because it reduces the amount I’m regularly backing up, if I can remove the bog to a single folder out of the way.
Anyway, here are a couple of workarounds to problems that I came across too…
Move Firefox Disk Cache
- Type about:config into Firefox’s Address Bar and press Enter.
- Right click on the resultant screen and select the option to create a new string value.
- Name this entry browser.cache.disk.parent_directory
- The content should be the location of where you wish the cache to be located
And that’s it done.
Move a Firefox Profile
- Shut down Firefox
- Move the profile folder to the desired location. For example, on Windows XP, move the profile from C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default to D:\Stuff\MyProfile
- Open up profiles.ini in a text editor. The file is located in the application data folder for Firefox on Windows Vista, XP, 2000: %AppData%\Mozilla\Firefox\
- In profiles.ini, locate the entry for the profile you’ve just moved. Change the Path= line to the new location. If you are using a non-relative pathname, the direction of the slashes may be relevant (this is true for Windows XP)
- Change IsRelative=1 to IsRelative=0
- Save profiles.ini and restart Firefox
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