ProfileLink is an application designed to help laptop users easily use their computer at different locations. When using a laptop computer at different locations, e.g. office, home and travelling may require the user to make different kinds of selections when launching applications. When the user logs on to the computer ProfileLink will start automatically and launch the applications that the user has assigned to the current hardware profile. ProfileLink will also set up the users default printer depending on hardware profile. If the user changes the default printer ProfileLink will register this and use this setting the next time the user logs on using the same hardware profile. As an example we can take a look at how to use a mail client. E.g. when using the computer in the office the user will normally use the company’s mail server, but when using the computer at home or while travelling the user might use the mail server of some ISP. Prior to ProfileLink there ware several ways to accomplish this, but none of them ware fully automatic. One way to do it could be to let the user select the profile when the mail client was launched, another could be to create a number of batch files that the user could invoke depending on his or her current location. The last method we will mention here is one that seems to be widely used and it relies on creating multiple user-accounts for the same user and letting the user select the account matching the location, e.g. Lisa would have three accounts, Lisa (Office), Lisa (Home) and Lisa (Travelling). The problem with this solution is that if Lisa installs a new program in the office account it will not be available in the two other accounts. With ProfileLink it is possible to configure which parameters a specific application should be launched with depending on the current location. Instead of using different user-accounts for the same user ProfileLink relies on multiple hardware profiles.

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