Two computers here at the office are identical Win 7 machines from Dell. Mine takes about a second and a half to log on to our domain in the morning. My co-worker’s can take three or four minutes. Every single time. Both users are set up identically (as far as I can tell) in Active Directory on our domain controller.
I can’t figure it out. I’m far from an expert on these things, though. One “fix” I’ve found googling this is changing the desktop to a .jpg instead of a solid color is supposed to speed up logging in, but all of our desktops already are .jpgs. Any idea what I could check on his machine?
Same thing in safe mode? In Windows 7 I had to do some command line nonsense for response times from the server, but nothing regarding login I’m afraid.
I was having the same problem with Laptops in my domain, I disabled offline file synch and straight away the login time went from about 10 minutes to 30 seconds!
Are now using Windows Sync Toy."
And…
"Morning Folks. I’ve been trying to solve this issue for awhile now. It affects mostly laptops users because of “site switching”… Home, work, public areas, different LAN and Wi-Fi networks.
It seems to be affecting Domain computers only… The solution I found was to reset your domain password (Either from Machine or AD) and reboot. Your login should now be back to normal.
I have a feeling that the local cached credentials get “out of sync” and takes longer than usual to log on.
This fix has been applied 4 times to my users computers and it seemed to fix the problem.
I’d like to hear feedback if this fixed your issue."
I had to look up roaming profiles, but I don’t think we use them. I know if I logon to a different machine using my information, I don’t get my desktop and files.
I have not tried safe mode. I’ll do that today at lunch. Will also try resetting his password. I don’t think there’s any file synching going on, but I’ll take a look.
A roaming profile would cause this, as would a -lot- of shit in the user’s profile. Other things include messed up or hard coded DNS settings, wireless versus wired, a problem with the disk or memory, a messed up antivirus install, even some recently installed programs. This is a hard problem to track.
Thank you, sir. I’m not the only IT person here though, we are legion. :) My IT background covers the whole spectrum, but my specialty doesn’t come up on the forum much. There are a number of people here that make this place awesome.
As Skipper wrote, there a a number of potential causes. In my experience, such an egregiously long logon time almost always tends to be a result of a DNS problem.
You want to make certain that the PC is using the Domain Controller’s IP as its primary DNS server. You don’t want to have some Internet, or even your firewall/router IP entered as the DNS server.
Typically, if you’re using DHCP this isn’t a problem, and PC’s automatically get the proper DNS server, but it’s worth verifying.
I think Skipper nailed it. I would advise much the same, start by logging them in with a clean startup to see if it’s something loading at startup that is causing the delay rather than a network issue.
Also, try setting the users desktop back to default. Sometimes users like to put wallpapers and patterns up on their desktops that are WAY too large in filesize, and that can cause an issue, especially if it’s loading off a network share. Sometimes they try to switch this back and you get the weird effect where a pattern or picture loads under another background, so you don’t even see what’s causing the problem unless you catch it at startup/shutdown.
Finally, if all else fails, I assume the company has some kind of anti-virus/anti-malware in place and that it’s most likely a managed solution (Like Symantec Endpoint Protection). I’ve seen cases where the client was unable to get connection to the management server for anti-virus protection, and that caused delays and errors at startup. Check the users Application and System logs for any signs that something is timing out or failing to connect at startup, and check the management server for the anti-virus to see if it’s reporting any issues with that client.
