Logon Times/Speed

[Ryan233]

Good Morning Everyone

Well i have taken on another 5-6 Primary schools and i have been on a little tour of them all.

There is one school that is using Roaming Profiles for staff also redirecting everything and there are logon times are crazy. Like 25-30mins to logon. There are using mandatory profiles with redirected for students.


I have had a quick look and the roaming users profiles are averaging between 10mb to 100mb. That is obviously a major issue and the students profiles are averaging between 9mb to 20mb which is huge. Most of the computers are about 5-6 years old,by the look of thinsg the old Tech has started rolling out Windows 7 laptops

The Server is about 2-3 years old and it is running Windows Server 2003,that is the DC also there have another server which is running Windows Server 2003 R2.By the look of things This is a print server. There have a 2TB NAS drive doing nothing.

I'm going have a good look at the server tomorrow,to see what GPO there are running and DNS Stuff like that but what would you recommend me to do?

Start from Scratch?
Making New profiles?

[zag]

Turn off roaming profiles!

I really don't get why anyone needs to take their desktop settings around with them these days. Just setup some Group policy rules and let them create a new profile on each PC.

20 seconds logons, job done!

[Ryan233]

Turn off roaming profiles!

I really don't get why anyone needs to take their desktop settings around with them these days. Just setup some Group policy rules and let them create a new profile on each PC.

20 seconds logons, job done!

I think i will get a better understanding tomorrow when i have a good look on the server. I was thinking of storing the profiles on the Nas? Do you think this would be ok?

[zag]

I think i will get a better understanding tomorrow when i have a good look on the server. I was thinking of storing the profiles on the Nas? Do you think this would be ok?

My original point still stands, why are they using roaming profiles? They really are not designed for school use. The only thing I can think of is if people need to move computers all the time and access the full outlook client.

Removing roaming profiles is as simple as emptying the profile feed for the user in active directory.

[Ryan233]

I agree with you mate.

I have just inherited this network and i don't know why he was using Roaming Profiles. I will have a look tomorrow and try and few things out.

[edutech4schools]

Take your time. I took over some schools and went to change some standard settings which snowballed as something unrelated had been configured incorrectly by the previous tech.

[Ryan233]

Thank you for your reply.

[themightymrp]

I'm thinking more than just roaming profiles is the issue here. Even with a profile of 100mb it shouldn't take half an hour to logon! This sounds like more of a network problem where it might be trying to search for something that doesn't exist. Check any policies or scripts which map network drives or redirect to location which may have changed. Even a 100mb/s network should be faster than that!

[Ryan233]

I will have alook at that, I can say this,when i was looking yesterday i did notice about 5-6 different folders,where users redirected stuff was going.

[gshaw]

Turn off roaming profiles!

I really don't get why anyone needs to take their desktop settings around with them these days. Just setup some Group policy rules and let them create a new profile on each PC.

20 seconds logons, job done!

Staff using custom Office settings and so on won't roam if they hot desk so roaming does have its place imo. Wouldn't it drive you crackers to set up your environment every time? For classrooms where you need consistency I go for mandatory profiles but depends on the needs of your users.

If logons are taking 30 minutes something is horribly wrong somewhere, is the rest of the network slow or are the profiles huuuge?

[Ryan233]

profiles are HUGE..i think i was being nice saying 100mb ha ha. Some of them are like 400-500mb.

[zag]

Staff using custom Office settings and so on won't roam if they hot desk so roaming does have its place imo.

Not really, we use live@edu so setting up Outlook again is as simple as loading it and typing in their usernames and passwords once.

All staff have their own laptops so its a non issue to us really.

[MatthewL]

No need for roaming profiles, get rid they do nothing but cause issues.

You can set everything up to be automated without the need for this and settings to follow you around.

As for outlook get Outlook to launch with a PRF configuring it if you need to.

[Ryan233]

Thank you for the suggestions. Just to clear a few things up. We do not use Outlook at all.

[zag]

Thank you for the suggestions. Just to clear a few things up. We do not use Outlook at all.

Then there is no point in using roaming profiles.

You might need to set a few things like backgrounds and start menu, desktop redirection in Group Policy but you should be fine after that.