Acceptable logon times?

[kennysarmy]

I've just done some testing after hearing a few whispers that certain teachers are complaining about the time taken to logon.

 

Admittedly the PC I've tested on has an i7 processor and most in the classrooms have i3 and I know this will make a difference, but it's similar in other respects, RAM, SSD drive, same motherboard.

 

Boot times - 25 seconds to CTRL+ALT+DEL

 

1st logon time - 25 seconds

2nd logon time - 10 seconds

 

We generally keep PC's around the school for up to 5 years, sometimes a month or two longer and some of the older PC's won't have SSD drives, may only have 2/3Gb RAM.

 

We run Windows 7 64 bit and have done all the tweaks I've been able to find to speed up logon times, though if anyone has any ideas to squeeze anymore out of it I'd be interested.

 

But my main point is that with the majority of teachers now having school iPads which are instant on devices how much is their view of how quickly things should be ready being skewed?

[Michael]

Those times are more than acceptable. I find if you enable verbose/highly detailed messages -

 

Computer config > Policies > Admin Templates > System - Display highly detailed status messages - Enabled

 

It gives the end user more information rather than 'Please wait...' which can seem to take longer.

[SHimmer45]

i would be very pleased with those login times,

i still cant get 7 to login as fast as XP (the default profile is just bigger) if i trim it too much it grumbles

[computer_expert]

I'd be pleased with those times too. I get around 20-30s here (not bad considering some of the hardware)

 

I know somewhere local where they won't do anything until the logons take over 7 minutes (with reasonable machines too)

[kennysarmy]

I've taken one of our slower PC's.

 

Boot times increase from 25 seconds to 50 seconds.

 

Initial logon times increase from 25 seconds to 1 min 25 seconds.

Subsequent logon times increase from 10 seconds to 35 seconds.

 

So it's around 2 minutes for the worst PC's on site from off to logged on.

 

Preparing your desktop takes by far the longest time to process during logon.....

[mattpant]

Our logon times since moving to Windows 8.1 are horrendous - the longest part being at the "Preparing your desktop" section - we use mandatory profiles - what can I do to trim the profile down / speed the logons up - When I look at what's running it tends to be Active Setups running - I switched on the verbose/highly detailed messages to see what was happening and you get what looks like the Windows 8 - Setting up your Apps / First Time logon screen each time.

 

Thanks

 

Matt

Edited January 26, 2015 by mattpant

[Blue_Cookeh]

Our logon times since moving to Windows 8.1 are horrendous - the longest part being at the "Preparing your desktop" section - we use mandatory profiles - what can I do to trim the profile down / speed the logons up - When I look at what's running it tends to be Active Setups running - I switched on the verbose/highly detailed messages to see what was happening and you get what looks like the Windows 8 - Setting up your Apps / First Time logon screen each time.

 

Thanks

 

Matt

 

You can disable this via GPO in Administrative Templates > System > Logon.

 

Logon times for us are around the 1 minute mark on Windows 8 from cold boot to desktop, running i3 with 4GB RAM and a HDD.

[sted]

You can disable this via GPO in Administrative Templates > System > Logon.

 

Logon times for us are around the 1 minute mark on Windows 8 from cold boot to desktop, running i3 with 4GB RAM and a HDD.

 

you can but dosent it just show a black screen instead for the same amount of time?

[crc-ict]

You can disable this via GPO in Administrative Templates > System > Logon.

 

Which setting there are you talking about? We suffer with long first-time logins on Windows 8, but I can't see any settings in there which refer to setting up Apps.

[mattpant]

Yes - sorry - I switched it on temporarily to see what it was actually doing - If it's not enabled, you just get the blue screen with Preparing Desktop for the same amount of time - but what we are trying to find out is why it's doing it in the first place and how we can reduce whatever it is doing preparing apps within the mandatory profile to speed things up!

[sted]

im not sure you will speed it up as it will be configuring mailweater etc apps for [email protected] (probably not something that would work on a shared profile). The only way I suspect you can make it much faster is to remove the apps using dism so theres less to set up

[themightymrp]

Preparing your desktop takes by far the longest time to process during logon.....

 

Do you perchance use File System filtering to prevent desktop.ini files being created in users home directories? (for the old "all folders show as Documents" fix). When we blocked the .ini file being created it slowed the Preparing your Desktop by a good 6 seconds!

[themightymrp]

Also check this link:

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-7/78818-long-preparing-your-desktop-delay.html#post725632

[themightymrp]

Just following on from my link, I disable the Active Setup for Windows Mail as mentioned by deploying a registry tweak in group policy preferences. It took our login times down dramatically!!

 

[DavetheITguy]

The boot time at my Academy is 16 seconds, this is from starting windows to CTRL+ALT+DEL, Our profiles times are 11 seconds first logon and then 7 seconds thereafter. Our infrastructure has 10Gig backbone and 1Gig to desktop. We have minimal Group Policies and mandatory profiles that staff and students use.

[afc123]

Ours are around 1-2 minutes shocking really but expected on 9 year old dell optiplex 740's!

[mattpant]

The boot time at my Academy is 16 seconds, this is from starting windows to CTRL+ALT+DEL, Our profiles times are 11 seconds first logon and then 7 seconds thereafter. Our infrastructure has 10Gig backbone and 1Gig to desktop. We have minimal Group Policies and mandatory profiles that staff and students use.

 

Can you outline please the process you've used to achieve such fast logon times - what steps have you taken to setup your mandatory profiles to get such fast logon times?

 

What O/S are you using?

[DavetheITguy]

We are using a mix of Server 2012 R2 and Server 2008 R2, the desktop computers are running Windows 7 Enterprise x64. Our Mandatory profile size is 1.43MB, the process we go through is quite simple, to get our mandatory profile we built a fresh machine, we then created a user, made all the adjustments, stripped everything we didn't need (settings and all the unwanted stuff) we then exported the profile to the server, changed the NTUSER from .DAT to .MAN, assigned all the permissions in regedit and assigned the folder and security permissions. All our settings are controlled via Group Policy. Instead of having different GPO's we consolidated it into only a couple. All the Shared Areas, restrictions, folder redirections etc are placed in one GPO, the printers are mapped via another GPO which uses a script that uses the name of the computer e.g. (S01-Faculty) it will map based on the location ..(S01) and matches it with the correct printer using a CSV file. compared to GPP printer mapping the script doesn't affect the log on speed and is guaranteed to work every time. In total all user settings are consolidated into 3 GPOs. The computer containers only contain one GPO which uses desktop and start menu redirection. Our system is very complex but I have made it better and faster by consolidating things.

Hope this helps. If you need any more information feel free to contact me.

[free780]

For those with slow times on win7 x64 we also get the preparing desktop for ages. Seems to be ie4unit.exe winmail and the TCP connection to the DC. Still not found the solution.

[jdoldridge]

We are using a mix of Server 2012 R2 and Server 2008 R2, the desktop computers are running Windows 7 Enterprise x64. Our Mandatory profile size is 1.43MB, the process we go through is quite simple, to get our mandatory profile we built a fresh machine, we then created a user, made all the adjustments, stripped everything we didn't need (settings and all the unwanted stuff) we then exported the profile to the server, changed the NTUSER from .DAT to .MAN, assigned all the permissions in regedit and assigned the folder and security permissions. All our settings are controlled via Group Policy. Instead of having different GPO's we consolidated it into only a couple. All the Shared Areas, restrictions, folder redirections etc are placed in one GPO, the printers are mapped via another GPO which uses a script that uses the name of the computer e.g. (S01-Faculty) it will map based on the location ..(S01) and matches it with the correct printer using a CSV file. compared to GPP printer mapping the script doesn't affect the log on speed and is guaranteed to work every time. In total all user settings are consolidated into 3 GPOs. The computer containers only contain one GPO which uses desktop and start menu redirection. Our system is very complex but I have made it better and faster by consolidating things.

Hope this helps. If you need any more information feel free to contact me.

 

I'd be interested to see what unwanted stuff you take out of your mandatory profile. It is something I am looking at at the moment and it seems when I've opened office and Adobe CS6 apps then the profile size seems to grow to around 600Mb which is obviously not healthy.

[kevin_lane]

We dont use profiles for students we just redirect the desktop and logins are pretty quick

[kennysarmy]

From my testing yesterday regards student logons to slower PC's around the school:

 

All times from CTRL+ALT+DEL to desktop.

 

PC Start-UP

First logon for user with stub paths in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components

 

1 min 24 seconds.

*16 seconds to get to "Preparing your desktop screen"

 

Second logon for user with stub paths in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components

 

33 seconds.

 

 

PC Start-UP

First logon for user with stub paths not in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components ie. DELETED!

 

1 min 8 seconds.

 

 

2nd and subsequent logons to turned on PC

First logon for user with stub paths not in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components ie. DELETED!

 

48 seconds.

 

 

2nd and subsequent logons to turned on PC

First logon for user with stub paths not in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components ie. DELETED!

NO User Group Policies Running

40 seconds.

 

 

 

Questions:

 

1. Why is it quicker to logon to a PC that's already been logged on to once already?

 

2. Are there any cons to removing all the stub paths?

 

3. Our C:\Users\Pupilx folders are 46Mb after first logon - if I wanted to reduce this is this possible?

[DavetheITguy]

From my testing yesterday regards student logons to slower PC's around the school:

 

All times from CTRL+ALT+DEL to desktop.

 

PC Start-UP

First logon for user with stub paths in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components

 

1 min 24 seconds.

*16 seconds to get to "Preparing your desktop screen"

 

Second logon for user with stub paths in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components

 

33 seconds.

 

 

PC Start-UP

First logon for user with stub paths not in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components ie. DELETED!

 

1 min 8 seconds.

 

 

2nd and subsequent logons to turned on PC

First logon for user with stub paths not in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components ie. DELETED!

 

48 seconds.

 

 

2nd and subsequent logons to turned on PC

First logon for user with stub paths not in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components ie. DELETED!

NO User Group Policies Running

40 seconds.

 

 

 

Questions:

 

1. Why is it quicker to logon to a PC that's already been logged on to once already?

 

2. Are there any cons to removing all the stub paths?

 

3. Our C:\Users\Pupilx folders are 46Mb after first logon - if I wanted to reduce this is this possible?

 

 

answer to question 1 - the computer caches the profile on the computer which makes it faster to log on, I have a group policy to remove cached profiles as they just take up space and they don't make a difference to my log on time.

 

answer to question 3 - you will have to take a look at the profile itself to establish why it is this big, it could be programs saving info in the app data folder.

[kennysarmy]

answer to question 1 - the computer caches the profile on the computer which makes it faster to log on, I have a group policy to remove cached profiles as they just take up space and they don't make a difference to my log on time.

 

answer to question 3 - you will have to take a look at the profile itself to establish why it is this big, it could be programs saving info in the app data folder.

 

RE: answer to question 1.

 

I don't mean it's quicker to logon a second time with the same user - I mean it's quicker to logon as another user, once the PC has already been logged on to by someone else....

 

Cheers

[kennysarmy]

By disabling all user group polices (twenty of them) and removing the logon scripts from the test users I've been able to get logon times down from CTRL+ALT+DEL to desktop to 30 seconds (from about 1 minute)

 

By enabling each group policy it seems to linearly increase logon times. (So no one policy seems to be a culprit)

 

The logon script does nothing more than map 6 network drives and install printers using the code:

 

c:\windows\con2prt /f

c:\windows\con2prt /c \\ps02-v\FindMe_Colour

c:\windows\con2prt /cd \\ps02-v\FindMe_Mono

 

 

@set str=%computername%

@set pos123=%str:~0,3% @echo %pos123%

if %pos123%==STA goto STA

 

:STA @echo Setup Staffroom printers here

c:\windows\con2prt /cd \\ps02-v\Staffroom1_5140

c:\windows\con2prt /c \\ps02-v\Staffroom2_5140

goto END

 

 

etc

 

 

 

I could combine some of the group policies but would it really dramatically increase logon times - I doubt it...

 

It just seems the slower PC's take longer to process each step of the logon.....

 

Any comments?