Windows 11 First Login

[stebo730]

Good afternoon,

 

We are deploying alot of new Windows 11 devices, however we are noticing on first login that it can take up to 10 minutes to sign in.  Obviously this is when it creates the profile and is doing many things in the background.  Once school returns this has the possibility of causing chaos especially on a class full of laptops logging in for the first time.  I just wondered what everyone is doing these days to address this, are Mandatory Profiles still a thing? are Teachers getting Pupils to always sign in on the same device or has anyone found a better way to speed things up?

 

 

[NicholasEsping]

How are you deploying these? Windows 11 first log on for us takes 30 seconds at most. Our image is pretty basic we preload office and set our application control policies then capture and deploy using FFU images.

[3s-gtech]

This shouldn’t be the case. Using local profiles and a decent machine, first sign-in is 45 seconds max. Other profile types are increasingly not supported (but will work).

Can you enable verbose sign-in? Are you deploying printers during logon?

[dmj]

Wow. these times are terrible. 

We used to time our from student to cold boot to sending an email to the teacher as a start of lesson activity. First email was 25 sec and longest 40. 

On wifi. We'd re-image them in 2 mins flat. This was ten years ago....

[Gongalong]

With both Win 10 and 11 post a MEMCM rebuild task sequence, the first login for us always takes around 10 minutes. I have always assumed it was some further setup that was required. Second login onwards is back to normal, in that it only takes seconds (25 seconds on a reasonable spec machine I've just tested on).

[FragglePete]

Since moving to local profiles (was redirected folders to on prem storage) along with utilising OneDrive and redirect key folders to that, our first logon can be anything from 30 secs, usually no more than a minute depending on the spec of the PC.  It then takes a few secs longer for the OneDrive client to sync up.

 

Pete

[MatthewL]

I have noticed first login times on local none domain machines is longer than it should be, brand new hardware too.  Just presumed this was normal as I don't touch desktops as much as I used to.

[midweek]

Our fresh Windows 11 build has gone to about 60-90 seconds for first login (was probably half that or less with W10 on the same machines).

 

We have verbose on and it gets past all the usual sticking points (printers etc) after 10 seconds and sits at "Preparing Windows" for the rest of the time.

 

For W10 I did have a stripped down default user profile sitting in the netlogon folder which sped things up but W11 doesn't seem to recognise it.

[thimon]

11 hours ago, Gongalong said:

With both Win 10 and 11 post a MEMCM rebuild task sequence, the first login for us always takes around 10 minutes. I have always assumed it was some further setup that was required. Second login onwards is back to normal, in that it only takes seconds (25 seconds on a reasonable spec machine I've just tested on).

That is not normal. First login should be a minute max. For optimised speeds ensure you’re using local profiles, OneDrive for storage, ditch group policy for mapping drives and printers as those two settings alone can cause profile logins to hang. 

[Gongalong]

When I say first login, this is literally the very first login on the machine post-building with MEMCM. Every subsequent login is normal, irrespective of user. I assumed it was some post-build thing, as both Win 10 and 11 do it.

[5nowman]

Get a machine with the image. put it in an OU with no group policies and see how long "First Logon" takes... it could be a policy.

 

 

[mavhc]

Computer Configuration>Policies>Administrative Templates>System>Display highly detailed status messages

 

Is a first step to see where it's taking a long time

[mavhc]

also 

 

[Smokebomb]

Do the PCs have the July 2025 cumulative update installed? We're seeing this behaviour with new user logins since that was installed, and checking the event log we can see errors relating to universal app provisioning that seems to be slowing down the first login. I've seen this reference to similar behaviour in a reddit thread for the July patches: 

 

[Smokebomb]

Looks like the August cumulative update will fix this issue. Listed under the “Improvements” section of the release notes:

 

Authentication] Fixed: This update addresses an issue that caused delays during sign-in on new devices. The delay was due to certain preinstalled packages.

 

 https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/topic/august-12-2025-kb5063878-os-build-26100-4946-e4b87262-75c8-4fef-9df7-4a18099ee294