XP Profile Limit?

[Murray Foote]

I recently purchased an XRite Pulse package and the manual specifies their should be a maximum of 50 profiles in the Windows\ ... \Color directory. I thought that this applied to operating systems prior to XP but is this really so. I also have received the suggestion that it may apply to ICC but not ICM profiles.

I currently have 37 ICC and 37 ICM profiles with no apparent problem. The Windows Colour App only finds 47 in total, of which 20 are monitor, 22 are printer, 5 are scanner and 2 are colourspace.

Is there really a limit and does it really make any difference?

Regards,
Murray

[Ray West]

Hi Murray,

I saw something similar a year or so ago when I installed my optix xr stuff. I can find no other mention of a limit, on the microsoft site, or elsewhere, but I'm not saying that that means that such a limit does not exist. I think it may be something they do to make their life easier. What happens if you put on 51? you lose the first one, the system freezes? If it was so important, I would think their software would flag it at the time of trying to add the extra ones.

Best wishes,

Ray

[Cem_Usakligil]

Hi Murray,

Why don't you copy and paste some icc and icm profiles in the C:\WINDOWS\system32\spool\drivers\color till you exceed 50 and then see what happens?
I just did so on my system, and nothing visible has happened yet :).

Cheers,

Cem

[John_Nevill]

The only time I've seen an excessive number of profiles as being a problem was with 3rd party software. Specificlly the Scangear app packaged with Canon scanners.

I had >100 profiles in the C:\WINDOWS\system32\spool\drivers\color folder due to profile development and when I tried to choose a profile within the Scangear software it would crash.

This limitation probably had more to do with how the application allocates memory for profile selection. I reduced the number of profiles and it worked.

[Murray Foote]

Another reason to avoid Scangear. OK, thanks, I'll just assume there is no problem until one surfaces.

[Sean DeMerchant]

I recently purchased an XRite Pulse package and the manual specifies their should be a maximum of 50 profiles in the Windows\ ... \Color directory. I thought that this applied to operating systems prior to XP but is this really so. I also have received the suggestion that it may apply to ICC but not ICM profiles.


I have 127 ICM files and 63 ICC files without issue. My system is slow to boot, but I doubt it is the profiles due to the excessive number of things I run by default. I have shifted most of the ICC profiles to a backup directory (37 old monitor profiles) and will see if that reduces boot times noticeably. But the ICM files are mostly camera profiles for RAW conversion and I cannot see any reason to get rid of them.

a data point,

Sean (who is unlikely to reboot any time soon unless a problem occurs)