McChikenhanger

Hi guys, Just a quick post to see if I can get any ideas in how to speed up our Logon On and Logoff process here at work. At the moment when anyone logs in it takes like 10 minutes before anyone can use the computers, as the computer will sit there Applying Computer Settings for at least 10 minute, and the same for when logging off. Any ideas anyone? We are still running on Windows 2003 and XP for client machines. The main AC controller is pretty old, so I don't know whether that is part of the problems, and there's other 2 servers equally as old acting as back up AD servers and load balancing. Thanks for any help.

Thanks dhicks. I was going to try Debian next. Was using Slax today, as it's got all the drivers that makes the laptop go with no problem, buthaving problems installing itfrom the CD to the HDD. It seems that it likes torun as a live CD too much. Thanks for the notes. Will follow them and see how far I get. Thanks.

Thanks for the info Pogson, it's very helpful. I've only just started to experiment with Linux for this kind of stuff. I'm afraid that I'm more of a Microsoft Windows person, so when it comes to what things need changing in Linux, I'm a bit at a loss. The machines that I'll be using are laptops, so they will be connecting through the wireless. Is it difficult to get them working in this way? They all have HDDs so I think I'll have them booting up from there, instead of PXE. Don't think you can do PXE boot through Wireless. I was thinking of using something like Ubuntu, seems fairly easy to get that one working.

Yeah, I know. The servers are already in place, and we already have thin clients dotted around. I'm just trying to breath a new lease of life to old laptops instead of throwing them away, hence why I don't want to spend money on the project.

Thank you FN-GM, but I think I'll have to use open source software, that way we can save on money. But the blog that you pointed to makes for an interesting reading. Maybe it will give me some ideas. Thanks.

Thank you dhicks, I'll have a look at that. However, the idea was to use old laptops that aren't doing anything anymore, and have them launch an RDP connection or something of the kind when they get turned on. Then the kids can use their credentials to log in and make it look as if they where sitting at the other normal thin clients that we have around here.

Budget is as little as possible. It's only a side project to see if we can breathe some life into some old laptops that we have sitting around doing nothing. The spec on the laptops is Pentium Celeron @1.4, 500Mb RAM, 40 Gb HDD. Numbers is for a full classroom of 30 to 30 laptops, connecting through Wi-Fi.

Hi there guys. Just interested to know if anyway has any ideas on how to turn a crappy old laptop into a thin client, running on Linux or Chromium. My idea was to have the bare minimums on the laptop so that when it starts up it can connect automatically to one of the Terminal Servers that are already running. Any ideas will be appreciated.