What is a Profile:
Your profile contains settings and configurations you may have adjusted on your PC, these are things like colour schemes, font sizes, internet bookmarks and outlook settings. This is the reason you can login to any PC on campus and you'll have the same settings applied on each one, your profile follows you around as you login to different PCs.
Why do I need a profile reset:
A profile reset may be required to resolve certain software issues and clean out possible corrupt files that can occur in users profiles, these files are constantly being updated and can become corrupted on occasion.
Prior to IT resetting your profile, you should back up and take note of certain settings in order to minimize disruption when you log in to a fresh new profile.
Things to consider taking note of or backing up:
Internet bookmarks:
we would always recommend staff have a back up of their bookmarks and do a back up at least once per year just in case there are any issues, to back up your bookmarks see below.
Guide on Backing up bookmarks/favourites
Outlook Shared Mailboxes:
Take note of any shared mailboxes you may have access to in outlook, once you log back in you will need to attach these mailboxes back using the following guide
Email Signatures:
If you only have the one email signature you can always get a copy from a previous sent email in your sent items so a back up of this is probably not needed. If you have multiple signatures you may want to back them to save any headaches.
Display settings or Colour Schemes:
There's no way to back up colour schemes or display settings, however you can take some notes on what you have set if you wish the same settings applied back to your new profile.
Other Application settings:
Though we can't cover all applications and their settings here, there may be other apps who's settings will be lost in a profile reset. If you are a heavy user of a certain application and have adjusted some settings to suit your needs, perhaps customized the toolbar, or visual options you may want to look at the settings on that app or take a picture of how it looked so you can get it back just how you like it when you login to your new profile. You can always consult the software vendors help manuals or consult Google for any advice on backing up settings for a particular application.