Profiles keep getting messed up on laptops

[ramsay]

Student profiles keep getting messed up on laptops. A class of 20 or so will log in and 5 will have issues. Giving them a new profile fixes the issue... until another day.

 

When the issue occurs it takes them a good few minutes to log in (instead of the usual 20 seconds ish) then they get an error saying they cannot see the desktop location (a network share). The big issue is then MS Office will not save! It throws up an error when they try and save about not being able to access the file menu. Basically the profile is screwed.

 

Looked at mandatory profiles but seems like a big issue with Windows 7, and we are indeed running into problems with them, so for now it's roaming profiles.

 

Any idea what's going on?

 

Many thanks

[stevenlong1985]

Have you looked at the Wikis on here Mandatory Profiles - Wiki you might have to rebuild the a new mandatory profile, make one and keep a backup copy somewhere just incase

[januttall]

check machine - user permissions but it sounds like a network issue. are all 20 loging in via the same AP if so that could be the issue if so you could install another AP at the other side of the room for example. but AP's can bug out if to many machines are trying to connect espechaly if all at once.

[stevenlong1985]

@januttall is right too, just to add, double check the event logs on the server make sure there's No DHCP problems

[andyturpie]

We had profile issues, we found it was because a lot of teachers were well above their disk quota limit....worth checking out

[ramsay]

No errors on the server. Wonder if the AP cannot handle them all at once, but surely that should just slow things down; not screw things up!

 

I'll have a look at that wiki and see if it helps get mandatory profiles running.

 

Thanks

[ramsay]

Quota is fine, and a new profile fixes it. Just looked through the Wiki and tried a few tweaks but still no further with mandatory profiles. I think I had a topic about mandatory profile issues (if not I will create one shortly) so will not talk about that further here; just wondering what could cause a profile to get messed up so easily.

[andyturpie]

@Ramsay, theres a gazillion threads on roaming vs mandatory profile issues on here, some of them may contain avenues you could look to investigate - good luck

[januttall]

AP's can only hold a set number of concurent users at any one time this can depend on the AP, due to chipsets, processor and memory etc. if the AP cannot handle them all there probably not be any errors on the server but there may be usefull logs on the laptops. and they will probably apear to be connected even if data is not going up and down.

 

just a sugestion but try loging 10-15 on or stagger the logins and see if you get errors if you do try a few less or try spliting the group between 2 APs if you have them just to test. it could also be signal strength or interferance. and once a profile is messed up on win 7 you do need to recreate it ive had that issue but it was caused by deleting user profiles from a computer, as you used to be able to in XP.

 

just a thought are you having any of these issues on your wired network. if not i would be verry strongly suspisious of the AP or wether you are overloading the connections to it. a firmware update may help the issue slightly. you could try telling the machines to wait for domain and wait for group policy. if it turns out to be signal related wich it dosent sound to be a higer gain antena say + 7dbi might help.