Win10 login speeds

[Rob414]

HI all,

We are in the middle of creating a Windows 10 build for staff and students. We’ve been testing v1607 LTSB for students in a small lab over the last few months and it seems stable enough to be used as the base image for the remainder of our student labs for this coming year.

My issue is login times. Even on the stripped down LTSB version it takes a good 90sec from login to desktop (which always seems longer when sitting in front of it). When building the image we use a setup profile and copy this to default (same as we did for Win7) which on the whole seems to be working fine. Start menu layout etc are all there for each login, search works ok. Just the time it takes to get there. Have checked all the usual things in default profile to make sure there’s no unnecessary files lurking. Have also checked GPO for any unnecessary influences.

 

Just wondering if anyone could offer any tips they’ve found when tweaking their image to speed up logins.

 

Thanks for any help,

Rab

[Joanne]

If you turn on verbose messages you'll be able to see exactly what it is doing. Mine don't take that long on initial login.

 

Are you on HDD or SSD?

[Passat1983ICTech]

how much ram have you got in the pc what are your profiles are you using as well for staff and students

[Passat1983ICTech]

how much ram have you got in the pc what are your profiles are you using as well for staff and students

 

is your HDD is it running at 100 % witch bois are you running have you update them as well

[Martin48]

How big is your new default profile? sometimes they can be 900mb even though literally only logged in then copied, you may want to trim some fat off them by deleting uneccessary files, you can get this down to 5mb. (best one for increasing speed)

 

Is it first time login for user or 2nd time aswell? (win10 even ltsb sets up metro apps which can be slow, you can use scripts to remove uneeded ones and if you have enterprise app locker to disable them)

Is it within 5 mins afterboot? (win 10 gets false fast boot speeds by delaying boot jobs which can slow the initial login after a boot up)

 

An SSD is recommended for 10 if possible it does like to read the disk a lot and do a lot of searches and precaching on login, we still have spinnies on some student pc's their is a noticeable performance loss, but not 90 seconds.

Edited May 3, 2017 by Martin48
typos fixed

[Liam]

20 seconds here first login and about 5 subsequent logins. I'm not happy with that initial time but I don't think there is anything I can do now to make it faster.

[Rob414]

Thanks for the replies guys.

We have HDDs or hybrids on our student machines. SSDs would be much better I agree, but management won't go with that option (new drives in old machine).

I've not updated the BIOS though, will look at that as well to see if it helps.

We use Deep Freeze to reset our machines as well, so it's always a first login for the student. But if they logout and not restart, the subsequent logins are much better.

Default profile is sitting at 77MB

I didn't think there were metro apps running on LTSB, but i'll double check that.

 

Thanks,

Rab

[Passat1983ICTech]

have a look at the HDD running at 100% as well if you are running the old bios look at the setting in there there is one call security boot up well not much you can do with it the HDD running at 100% there is a few fix's are round

[mrwoberts]

@Rob414

 

I'm in the testing period too, and I've been thinking about using the same method, even though I know it isn't best practice. However, if you can step back to the stage of setting up the default user, but run this brilliant app first - ShutUp10 (https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10), pretty much ticking everything. Then copy the profile to the default user. See if you notice a difference? I also disable the Windows Defender, as I've noticed it being a 'pickle' when it comes to resource usage....

[Sylv3r]

We are also testing this. Our first attempt on a Windows 10 build in a primary school was around 2 mins first logon. We've now got it down to 40 seconds for the standard PC's we use in school. We've got one PC's with a SSD drive and 16GB RAM and it logs in within 10 - 15 seconds. Unfortunatly my budget doesn't stretch that far to buy this spec of machine for everywhere.

[Rob414]

Thanks for the tip mrwoberts, i'll have a look at Shutup10 and see how that goes.

 

Cheers,

Rab

[Rob414]

I did try our build with an SSD and our standard 8Gb RAM and was much better times. However we're stuck with HDDs for most of the estate unfortunately.

 

Rab

[Joanne]

I just have local profiles with folder re-direction. Could you just set that up on the HDD machines? Should improve login times for them

[mrwoberts]

Hi Rob414

 

How did you get on with improving those login speeds?

[Rob414]

Hi,

had a look at the app you suggested and made a few tweaks with it. Managed to shave a little bit off the student build but nothing significant.

[mavhc]

"Hi, can we buy new computers for the whole school to make things 4 times faster?"

 

"No"

 

"OK, can we spend £50 per machine to make them 2 times faster, and we'll be able to move them to the new machines when we get those"

[mdrabble]

My Logon speeds are approx. 1min which isn't bad for a Core 2 Duo, 3GB Ram and an SSD.

 

Disabling Windows Search is helps - currently testing the same build on an i3, 6GB Ram and a Spinny HDD

[timbo343]

I was about to create a thread on this topic until i saw this thread on the recent posts.

 

I too am in a testing period with windows 10 having had windows 10 deployed since September 2016 and battled hard with login error messages that were caused by software that had been updated since deploying Windows 10.

 

Now that's all been sorted, our login times are about 1m06secs with mandatory profiles and the profiles on the machines are removed when the user has logged off. Is 1m 06secs acceptable.

 

Breaking this time down we have:

- Processing the Group Policies: 15secs

- Preparing Windows: 51secs.

 

God knows what's happening behind preparing windows!

 

I wish i could get down to less than 40secs.

 

Now, if we were to keep the profile on the machine and not delete it at logoff, we would have subsequent login times of 22secs as there's already a profile listed in Users. Keeping profiles on machines is not something i'd like to do, so i guess we keep the logins at 1m06secs. We are using LTSB2016.

[Liam]

Mine are 27 secs start and subsequent around 5 now. With a new profile..

[Passat1983ICTech]

liam what you running ssd or hdd

[dr_Wiley]

You can speed up login times in 1607 and previous windows 10 builds by disabling/breaking the systemapps (C:\Windows\SystemApps) that get installed on first logon.

 

For example renaming the folder Microsoft.XboxGameCallableUI_cw5n1h2txyewy to DISABLED_Microsoft.XboxGameCallableUI_cw5n1h2txyewy.

 

If you do this check your build afterwards to make sure that everything you need still works.

 

Also if you do this to the Microsoft.Windows.Cortana_cw5n1h2txyewy folder you will have no search on the start menu (not an issue if you're using classic shell) and if you're using 1703 your start menu will be unresponsive.

[timbo343]

You can speed up login times in 1607 and previous windows 10 builds by disabling/breaking the systemapps (C:\Windows\SystemApps) that get installed on first logon.

 

For example renaming the folder Microsoft.XboxGameCallableUI_cw5n1h2txyewy to DISABLED_Microsoft.XboxGameCallableUI_cw5n1h2txyewy.

 

If you do this check your build afterwards to make sure that everything you need still works.

 

Also if you do this to the Microsoft.Windows.Cortana_cw5n1h2txyewy folder you will have no search on the start menu (not an issue if you're using classic shell) and if you're using 1703 your start menu will be unresponsive.

 

We originally did this but didnt know if this was breaking our logins so we put some of them back. I had rad we need to keep ShellExperienceHost but the rest can back edited. The trouble is, at windows updates, these are put back (well, they were put back in April).

[mrwoberts]

@Rob414

 

Might not be 100% relevant, but this thread LINK and the scripts that Arthur 3s-gtech have developed will almost certainly improve things on a Windows 10 build.

By the way, I'm going with Windows 10 EDU edition, and using these scripts to disable the junk. What were your reasons for using LTSB?

[Arthur]

You can speed up login times in 1607 and previous windows 10 builds by disabling/breaking the systemapps (C:\Windows\SystemApps) that get installed on first logon.

Wouldn't it be better to do this the official way (DISM or PowerShell) to avoid breaking things?

 

The trouble is, at windows updates, these are put back (well, they were put back in April).

When you upgrade to RS3 later this year any apps that were removed in RS2 (1703) won't get added back.

Edited May 9, 2017 by Arthur

[Rob414]

mrwoberts,

yeah i've tried a few of these PS scripts, i'll take a look at that one you suggest. Many of the ones i've tested tend to leave some icons behind in the start menu.

We decided to go with LTSB so we weren't getting the metro apps issues and better control over the updates. The EDU edition looked to be exactly the same as enterprise but missing Cortana.