Windows 7 Pro on Netbooks

[psbresner]

Hello All,

 

I've recently deployed Windows 7 Pro to 25 netbooks and joined them to our domain, all is fine until you attempt to use them. Booting is quite slow and login takes ages. It can take 10 minutes just to logon to a standard user with a mandatory profile.

 

I've tried blocking all policies that were applied to it and this gets the time down to 3 minutes.

 

Anyone got any ideas why they are so slow?

 

Thanks

 

Paul

[Mcshammer_dj]

what spec are they??

[psbresner]

what spec are they??

 

Atom 1.6 Ghz

1 Gb RAM

250Gb HD

 

Thanks

 

Paul:D

[Haptic]

I would recommend upgrading them to 2Gb RAM - it will certainly help.

 

 

Chris

[Mcshammer_dj]

defo upgrade the RAM WIndows 7 is slow with 2 GB and ideally should be higher than that. But I would guess that you are limited to 2 GB. which atom model

[Guest TheLibrarian]

+1 for the RAM upgrade, we had to do that here.

 

We found it was also worth changing the amount of processors it can use during boot from 1 to the maximum available, it decreased boot time by about 30 seconds.

 

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Optimize-Windows-7-for-better-performance#section_9

 

RAM is always my stock answer because it's usually the truth; the link above provides other pointers.

Edited December 5, 2011 by TheLibrarian

[dhicks]

But I would guess that you are limited to 2 GB.

 

My home netbook came with specifications that listed a 2GB RAM limit, but it turns out that that's just Windows 7 Starter's arbitary limit on RAM, the machine will quite happily take 4GB of RAM. The harddrive could be a limiting factor - I should imagine some netbooks come with the slowest harddrives around, and if Windows 7 Pro has more to load off the harddrive that could be affecting boot time.

[Mcshammer_dj]

quite a lot of the netbooks are limited however. I have 2 netbooks and 1 (MSI) is able to go to 8gb RAm and the other (Vye) is limited to 2gb by the motherboard.

 

and I agree with @dhicks regarding the HDD's. May be worth trying one of then with a SSD or a faster drive to see if that makes a difference.

[SimpleSi]

It can take 10 minutes just to logon to a standard user with a mandatory profile.

 

Whats your times with other wireless machines and are they Win7 or XP?

 

sI