You Can Take It With You: Profile Transportability
By Liffick, Blaise W., PhD; Zoppetti, Gary, PhD; ITiCSE ’07 - Proceedings of the 12th Annual SIGCSE Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education,Publication Date: 2007
Discusses the development and functionality of the Personal Portable Profile (P3), an auto-run program stored on a USB Flash drive that allows a computer user to copy a user profile from one computer to another, either permanently or temporarily. Computer users often spend significant time configuring the system to their needs, including display size, keyboard mapping, and mouse function. Research conducted by the authors highlights the difficulty computer users experience in recalling custom settings on their computers. Existing solutions are discussed, highlighting their lack of functionality. The P3 system captures Windows profile settings from a source machine in a UD-RW Flash drive. When connected to a target computer, it copies the existing profile to the drive, and then installs the profile of the source computer. The target system’s original profile can be quickly restored when the user is finished. Design criteria are discussed, including the need for plug-and-play functionality and an easy to use display. Difficulties in copying key registry items are also discussed. Authors discuss the potential impact on education including allowing special education teachers to configure computers quickly, ease of use for maintaining university level computer labs, and the potential for computer science students to interact with non-standard user profiles.
Published by: Association for Computing Machinery (Website:http://www.acm.org)
SIGCSE (ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education) (Web Site: http://sigcse.org )
