The need for speed.....

All
Just a quick question to find out what your experience is with XP machines connected to a 2008 server environment. Currently it takes 3 minutes 30 seconds from switch on to use and and a further minute to fire up outlook.

I personally don't think this is excessive but I'm reliably informed by "teachers" this is too long and needs to be sped up.

There are two additional scripts that run when a user logs in the first maps their network drives and the other maps their printers depending on the location of the machine they are using. AD takes care of their H: drive.

So is 3 minutes 30 seconds to long?

I would not have said that 3 minutes 30 seconds is too long for that machine to go from cold boot to user logged on in front of a completed desktop. I would have said that we see similar boot times at many of our machines.

Have a look at this post: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/downlo...u-how-fix.html

The interface might give you some ideas about what is slowing down the boot.

However even on some of our faster machines some Staff are complaining that it takes too long to get started in the morning. I have gone to those stations where the complaints were loudest and had a look.

I have [in no particular order]

Prevented needless services starting
In-installed software not originally in the image/deployed by Group Policy [ie: Installed by staff]
Performed disk clean-up
Defragged the hard disk
Defragged the page file
Degragged the Registry
Deleted all profiles downloaded from the server

And several other process I can't recall at the moment.

However the biggest move forward and stopping all complaints was adjusting the BIOS so that the station starts an hour before the staff member arrives every morning. This allows that station to start and settle down but also it is a good time for those stations to receive new software via GPO. :thumb:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Geek_of_HeathMount

All
Just a quick question to find out what your experience is with XP machines connected to a 2008 server environment. Currently it takes 3 minutes 30 seconds from switch on to use and and a further minute to fire up outlook.

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Whats the spec of the machine?

How are you processing GPO's, Syncronosly or Asyncronosly?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Geek_of_HeathMount

is 3 minutes 30 seconds to long?

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I imagine it's about average. Some machines boot faster than others. Not a great deal you can do about it, beyond the obvious remove-the-rubbish - we use imaged workstations, though, with nothing extraneous installed. We redirect My Documents and Desktop for pupils, but their profile is created locally on each machine - when they first log on to a machine it takes a little while to sort out a new profile, but after that they logon in around 20 seconds. I have set Nod32 Antivirus to not do a logon scan, which helps with logon time a fair bit.

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David Hicks

Whack an SSD drive in the client, they are cheap as chips these days at smaller volumes.

It will halve the time to logon.

We're moving all the pupils to thin client devices and I'm trying to persuade the powers at be to use "instant on" tablets for the staff:pray2:. However, as with most things they won't let go of the money. I do like the SSD drive idea though :thumb:

If you need to explain this timeframe, stating the effects of corporate antivirus systems on older PCs usually does it! Sophos pretty much doubles our logon times, but they're not too bad - perhaps a bit quicker than yours. Easiest solutions are RAM upgrades (to a point - all our staff PCs are still 512MB so it would help us alot) and tidying up GPOs.

Our PC's are 50-60 seconds from power button to loaded desktop, and some of those are 6 years old, with 512MB RAM.

3 Minutes on a netbook/laptop is reasonable, but not for a hard wired machine.

Two things that spring to mind are trying to enable 'hibernate' so the PC's can start up quicky (though it's not without it's side-effects).

Looking at options for Wake-on-LAN (assuming your PCs support it) might also be useful as that way you could potentially turn on PCs in the morning and power them down (using a script) automatically at the end of the day thus eliminating start-up times altogether.

3 mins 30 secs plus a further minute to load outlook does seem a bit on the slow side but it entirely depends on your hardware spec and what software your running. When logging on performance of the server/network bandwidth will all have an impact aswell.

Same here (about 60 seconds until you can log in). The main issue is that once you have logged in, the machines with 512Mb of RAM take a minute or so before they can realistically do anything (whilst sophos is updated and GPO's processed & the user has clicked on IE8 several times....)

They are probably just looking at the speed their home machines and then thinking that the ones at work should be faster since they are managed better. Not necessarily so though since the ones at work have other things that the machines need to do to log in. It's what i would say to them.

I'm sure that I read somewhere though that the amount of OU's and linked GPOs can have an impact on the login speed so the hierarchy does need to be optimised on the server-side. Maybe it's something that could be looked at? I haven't seen, let alone used server 2008 though :(

Our staff don't think their school PCs are too slow, as their home machines all run Vista Home Premium with 1GB of RAM, Norton and McAfee are installed at once, plus 'XP Antivirus', and the system tray contains 54 icons. Most of which are related to toolbars.

Have you got huge roaming profiles? We moved to mandatory and login times dropped significantly.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by dhicks

I imagine it's about average. Some machines boot faster than others. Not a great deal you can do about it, beyond the obvious remove-the-rubbish - we use imaged workstations, though, with nothing extraneous installed. We redirect My Documents and Desktop for pupils, but their profile is created locally on each machine - when they first log on to a machine it takes a little while to sort out a new profile, but after that they logon in around 20 seconds. I have set Nod32 Antivirus to not do a logon scan, which helps with logon time a fair bit.

--
David Hicks

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Thats pretty much the same as I setup my schools ... with the addition of pointing the workstations DNS in tcpip settings at the local DNS server ... That makes a big diference in login times ..

Cheers
Brian Rumsey

i find most the issues are client based, i have got into the habbit of making sure i use
bootvis before creating any image. ( XP images )

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system...t/default.mspx

also making sure logon scripts are checked over, we have our printer scripts on the local drive and just have a policy to look at the script, i have noticed at some schools they run the script in the logon.bat :hand:

i also roll out a regedit for startup have a look here

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Run