Improving Win 7 First Logon Times

[CommodoreS]

I am looking for a way to improve the speed of a first time Windows 7 Logon for users. It currently takes about 50 seconds for the first time logon, and 15 seconds for subsequent logons with the user profile present.

 

I found this post: https://communities.vmware.com/thread/292229 on VMWare forums which mentions deleting the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Active Setup registry key, but I am a bit wary of doing this as I can't find any other posts which suggest doing this to speed things up.

 

I ahve not set up Roaming Profiles as I also have users with Offline Files setup and have a mixed Windows XP/Windows 7 network system, with the older machines still on XP. The server is 2008 R2.

 

I have also seen people mention using Liquidware ProfileUnity, which I can't see any price for so I image it is not cheap. Also another one called Forensit User Profile Manager, which again does not look like a cheap solution.

 

What I have also seen suggested is to copy everything into the default user profile - although no specifics on how to do this. I did read a MS article but it said it could only be done with a local account and not a network account.

 

A new profile is currently just under 27MB in size.

 

Does anyone have any solutions to reduce the time for the first time logon further?

[free780]

Copying to the default profile is unsupported and is a old nt way of pushing settings to a profile. You can press escape during the preparing desktop... and see whats slowing it down.

[burgemaster]

Few things to look into:

Disable creation of windows mail profile,

Disable creation of activex in profile.

Trim stuff from your mandatory profile, exclude from your roaming profile. Use verbose logging to see what's going on and the new event viewer to see exactly what is taking the time. Look at the enterprise slow login hot fixes, deploy your printers as a user policy not computer or you won't get logged in until printers are fully installed. Make sure your redirected wallpaper is small in size and your redirected startmenu isnt bloated in size.

Good luck

Edited December 13, 2013 by burgemaster

[gshaw]

The ActiveSetup key is pretty safe as long as you do it right, as mentioned above the Windows Mail database is the key culprit, adding ~25MB of junk into the profile and slowing down the logon process. Also check out your antivirus as well, that can slow things right down if you're using a product with a slow scanning engine (Sophos and Kaspersky fall into this category)

[jb2201]

If you are are running subnets, do you have subnet ranges defined for your AD's in Active Directory Sites & Services?

[CommodoreS]

Thanks for replies. Will look into Windows Mail. I guess I would just need to enable:

User Configuration, Adminstrative Templates, Windows Components, Windows Mail, Turn off Windows Mail.

For this to be disabled.

The AV is McAfee which is interesting, but its what the LEA provides free.

Its not running Subnets.

 

With the activex, would doing that affect IE, Office or WMP?