If you are working in a development environment, such as engineering or IT, users are sophisticated and commonly personalize their screen settings. On the other hand, if you are supporting computers deployed throughout your organization and your users aren't as sophisticated, you'd like to control the users' screen settings so they don't damage their working environment beyond their ability to recover it. Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 has a mechanism called user profiles to assist in both of these scenarios.
User profiles are environmental settings for each individual user's working environment.
Each user has his own profile so that when different users log onto an NT computer, they will each be presented with their personalized desktop environment. Both users and administrators benefit from profiles. The profile saves the settings and recalls them each time a user logs on, yielding the preferences that that user had. Since each user has his own profile, multiple users can log onto the same computer and they will all get their personal settings. For the administrator, user profiles can be used to define common settings for groups of users.