Wireless slowdowns & freezes

[contink]

Having some "fun" with a wireless system that seems to hit regularly and I'm reasonably sure I know why but a bit unsure as to how to combat it.

 

1. Sophos... This thing is a pig with wireless, because it doesn't indicate it's installing or updating and thus kids click away and sooner or later it just dies. It also has a habit of locking up if someone logs in too quickly just as Sophos has started it's update routine.

 

 

2. Windows Update... I suspect I've not helped myself here because WU was downloading the updates and then notifying every day but it seems that detection can lock a machine up (svchost just sitting there!) for 2 to 6 minutes and occassionally explorer just locks up and you get another freeze.

 

 

So far I've made a couple of alterations such as WinUpdates only handling updates on a set day and time now, Sophos has had the updates timing expanded to hours rather than every 5 minutes.. but we're still getting lock ups.

 

Anyone got any suggestions that might help?

[mattx]

Well you have highlighted the two problems I had with our wireless laptops. With the AV update - for us it was Trend, I wrote a delay script which delayed the start of any updates between 5 and 20 mins.

See:

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/scripts/23622-script-delay-trend-update.html

 

[ I am sure Sophos has a similar service which does the talking between the client and server ] You could do something similar.

 

I also have a separate group for our WSUS just for laptops - these only get updates at the start of any holidays so they never update during term time.

 

This and ripping out any un-necessary autostarts using autoruns [ check admin bar below ] has had a dramatic speed increase in logon times etc for our 70 or so laptops.