The need for speed.....

[Geek_of_HeathMount]

All

Just a quick question to find out what your experience is with XP machines connected to a 2008 server environment. Currently it takes 3 minutes 30 seconds from switch on to use and and a further minute to fire up outlook.

 

I personally don't think this is excessive but I'm reliably informed by "teachers" this is too long and needs to be sped up.

 

There are two additional scripts that run when a user logs in the first maps their network drives and the other maps their printers depending on the location of the machine they are using. AD takes care of their H: drive.

 

So is 3 minutes 30 seconds to long?

[6Foot2]

I would not have said that 3 minutes 30 seconds is too long for that machine to go from cold boot to user logged on in front of a completed desktop. I would have said that we see similar boot times at many of our machines.

 

Have a look at this post: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/downloads/57458-soluto-figures-out-what-bogging-down-your-pc-tells-you-how-fix.html

 

The interface might give you some ideas about what is slowing down the boot.

 

However even on some of our faster machines some Staff are complaining that it takes too long to get started in the morning. I have gone to those stations where the complaints were loudest and had a look.

 

I have [in no particular order]

 

Prevented needless services starting

In-installed software not originally in the image/deployed by Group Policy [ie: Installed by staff]

Performed disk clean-up

Defragged the hard disk

Defragged the page file

Degragged the Registry

Deleted all profiles downloaded from the server

 

And several other process I can't recall at the moment.

 

However the biggest move forward and stopping all complaints was adjusting the BIOS so that the station starts an hour before the staff member arrives every morning. This allows that station to start and settle down but also it is a good time for those stations to receive new software via GPO.

[Mr.Ben]

All

Just a quick question to find out what your experience is with XP machines connected to a 2008 server environment. Currently it takes 3 minutes 30 seconds from switch on to use and and a further minute to fire up outlook.

 

Whats the spec of the machine?

 

How are you processing GPO's, Syncronosly or Asyncronosly?

Edited June 21, 2010 by Mr.Ben

[dhicks]

is 3 minutes 30 seconds to long?

 

I imagine it's about average. Some machines boot faster than others. Not a great deal you can do about it, beyond the obvious remove-the-rubbish - we use imaged workstations, though, with nothing extraneous installed. We redirect My Documents and Desktop for pupils, but their profile is created locally on each machine - when they first log on to a machine it takes a little while to sort out a new profile, but after that they logon in around 20 seconds. I have set Nod32 Antivirus to not do a logon scan, which helps with logon time a fair bit.

 

--

David Hicks

[zag]

Whack an SSD drive in the client, they are cheap as chips these days at smaller volumes.

 

It will halve the time to logon.

[Geek_of_HeathMount]

We're moving all the pupils to thin client devices and I'm trying to persuade the powers at be to use "instant on" tablets for the staff:pray2:. However, as with most things they won't let go of the money. I do like the SSD drive idea though

[3s-gtech]

If you need to explain this timeframe, stating the effects of corporate antivirus systems on older PCs usually does it! Sophos pretty much doubles our logon times, but they're not too bad - perhaps a bit quicker than yours. Easiest solutions are RAM upgrades (to a point - all our staff PCs are still 512MB so it would help us alot) and tidying up GPOs.

[Quackers]

Our PC's are 50-60 seconds from power button to loaded desktop, and some of those are 6 years old, with 512MB RAM.

 

3 Minutes on a netbook/laptop is reasonable, but not for a hard wired machine.

[flyinghaggis]

Two things that spring to mind are trying to enable 'hibernate' so the PC's can start up quicky (though it's not without it's side-effects).

 

Looking at options for Wake-on-LAN (assuming your PCs support it) might also be useful as that way you could potentially turn on PCs in the morning and power them down (using a script) automatically at the end of the day thus eliminating start-up times altogether.

 

3 mins 30 secs plus a further minute to load outlook does seem a bit on the slow side but it entirely depends on your hardware spec and what software your running. When logging on performance of the server/network bandwidth will all have an impact aswell.

Edited June 22, 2010 by flyinghaggis

[Mr.Ben]

Same here (about 60 seconds until you can log in). The main issue is that once you have logged in, the machines with 512Mb of RAM take a minute or so before they can realistically do anything (whilst sophos is updated and GPO's processed & the user has clicked on IE8 several times....)

[HodgeHi]

They are probably just looking at the speed their home machines and then thinking that the ones at work should be faster since they are managed better. Not necessarily so though since the ones at work have other things that the machines need to do to log in. It's what i would say to them.

 

I'm sure that I read somewhere though that the amount of OU's and linked GPOs can have an impact on the login speed so the hierarchy does need to be optimised on the server-side. Maybe it's something that could be looked at? I haven't seen, let alone used server 2008 though

[3s-gtech]

Our staff don't think their school PCs are too slow, as their home machines all run Vista Home Premium with 1GB of RAM, Norton and McAfee are installed at once, plus 'XP Antivirus', and the system tray contains 54 icons. Most of which are related to toolbars.

[SpuffMonkey]

Have you got huge roaming profiles? We moved to mandatory and login times dropped significantly.

[Brpilot99]

I imagine it's about average. Some machines boot faster than others. Not a great deal you can do about it, beyond the obvious remove-the-rubbish - we use imaged workstations, though, with nothing extraneous installed. We redirect My Documents and Desktop for pupils, but their profile is created locally on each machine - when they first log on to a machine it takes a little while to sort out a new profile, but after that they logon in around 20 seconds. I have set Nod32 Antivirus to not do a logon scan, which helps with logon time a fair bit.

 

--

David Hicks

 

Thats pretty much the same as I setup my schools ... with the addition of pointing the workstations DNS in tcpip settings at the local DNS server ... That makes a big diference in login times ..

 

Cheers

Brian Rumsey

[marc2510]

i find most the issues are client based, i have got into the habbit of making sure i use

bootvis before creating any image. ( XP images )

 

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/fastboot/default.mspx

 

also making sure logon scripts are checked over, we have our printer scripts on the local drive and just have a policy to look at the script, i have noticed at some schools they run the script in the logon.bat

 

i also roll out a regedit for startup have a look here

 

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

[dhicks]

with the addition of pointing the workstations DNS in tcpip settings at the local DNS server ... That makes a big diference in login times ..

 

As in you have multiple DNS servers around the school, and you point each workstations at its closest one?

 

--

David Hicks

[dhicks]

we have our printer scripts on the local drive and just have a policy to look at the script, i have noticed at some schools they run the script in the logon.bat

 

Does running printer scripts from logon.bat, or from any other network-based location, make that much difference? If you have a half-decent server serving out your logon scripts, surley it should be able to cope?

 

--

David Hicks

[marc2510]

Does running printer scripts from logon.bat, or from any other network-based location, make that much difference? If you have a half-decent server serving out your logon scripts, surley it should be able to cope?

 

--

David Hicks

 

course it can cope but why add uneeded stress, well thats the way i see it.

 

i would suggest to try it.

 

printers.vbs in the route of C:\

 

as a GPO call it via a logon script "C:\printers.vbs" - hope that helps

[dhicks]

course it can cope but why add uneeded stress, well thats the way i see it.

 

I assume \\$domainController\NETLOGON is mounted on logon anyway, whether you run anything from it or not, so I don't think using a fixed script will make any appreciable difference to your network traffic. What happens if you want to change your printer setup in some way?

 

--

David Hicks

[marc2510]

if it is changed for some reason i would run a quick xcopy, but saying that in the last 2years i have not had to change the script.

[featured_spectre]

Whack an SSD drive in the client, they are cheap as chips these days at smaller volumes.

 

It will halve the time to logon.

 

The cheapest I have found through over 12 different suppliers (including sponsors on here) is £80 for a 40GB SSD drive, if you consider that to be cheap, over 200 machines it works out to be £16'000. That could be used to buy 7 new IWBs and projectors, sound, install et all for our place....

[zag]

I would only install them on machines that were slow. There is no need to upgrade 200 computers at once

 

Its just a quick fix like adding ram, but has the best benefit/cost ratio of a hardware upgrade these days especially on bootup time.

 

I intend to upgrade one of our ICT rooms soon with the Intel Value SSD drives

 

http://uk.insight.com/apps/productpresentation/index.php?product_id=ITGA06SF3&nbs_search=M%3DIT%26C%3D112%26S%3D1065

 

Should be able to do the whole room of 30 computers for £2,500 I reckon.

Edited June 22, 2010 by zag