Slow Logon on Dell machines

[Griffo]

Morning All,

 

I'm having a problem with all the Dell machines in the school.

 

They are taking between 2-5 minutes to logon whereas all the other PCs in the school (Fujitsu and HP) logon in 10-20 seconds.

 

They are Optiplex 170L P4 2.8Ghz running XP Pro.

All of which were re-imaged about 5 weeks ago because of the same problem, which seemed to cure it untill now.

 

Yesterday I updated 3 of them with SP3, all the latest MS updates, BIOS and NIC drivers.

These 3 machines now only take 50 - 60 seconds to log on.

 

We use 2003 Server std edn SP2 on the DC and Winsuite for the logon on the client machines.

(Loging on as admin which bypasses all winsuite controls is instant)

 

Any idea what I can do to get these Dell machines down to under 30 second logons?

[gshaw]

What section of the logon does it hang at? Have you tried some of the machines just with NIC update, some with just BIOS update and some with just Windows update to try and isolate the fix?

[timzim]

Get rid of WinSuite and use GPOs instead. I did and it's reduced logon times dramatically. It's also far easier to diagnose the sort of problems you're now experiencing.

[Griffo]

It seems to hang on the part of the logon script where it runs a .KIX file that changes registry settings for the proxy and a few other bits mainly for the win 98 machines.

 

I have only been here 3 months and a lot of the settings seem to be duplicated in logon scripts, policys and winsuite, and it has been pointed out to me by our county support that we have too many policys anyway.

 

Its a wonder it runs at all.

 

But its odd that on the other machines the logon is quite quick.

 

As for Winsuite I have already considered getting rid of it for many reasons. Maybe now is the time.

[timzim]

Win 98??? My God, do people still use it????

 

I presume your KixStart script identifies the OS before it tries to fiddle with the registry? Or are you trying to change w98 registry settings on the XP machines?

[Griffo]

Win 98??? My God, do people still use it????

 

I presume your KixStart script identifies the OS before it tries to fiddle with the registry? Or are you trying to change w98 registry settings on the XP machines?

 

Not that I can see, no, not in the script anyway, looks like it applies it to all machines.

 

Unless KIX32 which runs it can identify the OS?

 

(yes we still have 30ish 98 machines)

[timzim]

Have a look through the KixStart manual - you could add something like:

if @PRODUCTTYPE = "Windows 98"

then add the Win98 registry changes before endif

 

Don't know if that that will solve your problem but it might isolate that part of the script from it.

[Griffo]

Thanks, Will give it a try and let you know

[Griffo]

Right

 

I have changed the kix script to check for the OS and have put all the relavent commands in IF statements for the different versions.

 

But the Dell machines still take longer to log on.

 

Each section of the logon process is generally 5 seconds longer than any other PC in the school. The longest part being the last lines of the logon.bat which is @net time \\PDC /set /yes >nul

 

Any ideas?

[DrPerceptron]

remove that line, I removed it from my logon script ages ago, hasn't had any noticeable effect on anything...

 

There aren't any locally cached profiles on the machine?

 

Somewhere in Group Policy is an option to enable Verbose outputs of what Windows is upto - it's very useful for Vista machines because it doesn't just sit there saying "Preparing your Desktop" or "Installing Software" (it tells you!).

 

We turned it on to test and found it was kind of useful to leave it on. We had an issue where, because of IE7, applying the IE branding policy it would just sit around and do nothing for 20 seconds, it's worth looking at

[Griffo]

I can now report that logon times seem to have improved after running delprof on the whole suite.

 

Im going to set it to run from the server as a scheduled task weekly and see how it goes.

 

Alot of the profiles are about 20Meg, does that sound large? or do they vary greatly?

 

And the verbose outputs are really helpful, i'll probably just leave it on.

 

Cheers DrP

 

[DrPerceptron]

Depends on whether they are roaming and/or mandatory...

 

Our mandatory profile is about 1.5mb, the smaller you can get them, the better... much less traffic floating around.

[Griffo]

Both

 

The mandatory profile is about 3 meg and my documents are re-directed.

 

The localy stored profiles in this room are around 20 meg and the rest of the school is around 10-13 meg.

 

The only difference with this room of dells is that they have more apps than any other room in the school because they are used by technology for 3D graphics and design work