Windows 8.1: The Missing Manual

Profiles

As you read earlier in this chapter, every document, icon, and preference setting related to your account resides in a single folder: By default, it’s the one bearing your name in the Local Disk (C:)→Users folder. This folder’s friendly name is your Personal folder, but to network geeks, it’s known as your user profile.

The Public Profile

Each account holder has a user profile. But your PC also has a couple of profiles that aren’t linked to human beings’ accounts.

Have you ever noticed, for example, that not everything you actually see on your Start screen and on your desktop is, in fact, in your user profile folder?

Part of the solution to this mystery is the Public profile, which also lurks in the Users folder (Figure 24-14). As you can probably tell by its name, this folder stores many of the same kinds of settings your profile folder does—except that anything in (C:)→Users→Public→Desktop appears on everybody’s desktop.

Figure 24-14. Behind the scenes, Windows maintains another profile folder, whose subfolders closely parallel those in your own. What you see—the contents of the Desktop folder, Documents folder, Favorites list, and so on—is a combination of what’s in your own user profile folder and what’s in the Public folder.

All this is a long-winded way of suggesting another way to make some icon available to everybody with an account on your machine. Drag it into the Desktop ...