Hello everyone,
As an administrator, you might of come across this complaint many times. ‘my computer takes more time to login’ or ’slow logon process’. The reason may vary from anything like DNS, netbios over TCP, Domain mixed mode, complex GPOs which may deploy softwares, or any start-up program which may communicate network resource to proceed., the list may grow.
Here is a simple registry tweak which can make the login in async mode (meaning the logon process will not wait for anything, but proceed and give you the windows screen to work). Basically it will bring the login prompt show up before the network is fully initialized.
Enable Fast Logon : In a large networked computers it is recommended to have the Fast Logon enabled so that the logon/startup of the computer will be faster without waiting for the other network to come to live. Here is the procedure :
Registry settings to Enable Fast Logon
SyncForegroundPolicy (DWORD) = 1
in the hive
HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
make it to 0 so that it would be in Asynchronous.
You can apply this through the Desktop Central -> Registry configuration for your client computers.
cheers
Romanus



October 5th, 2008 at 9:22 pm
Quick follow-up post.
Here is the Microsoft page for General trouble shooting on the slow logon or start-up.
http://blogs.technet.com/instan/archive/2008/04/17/troubleshooting-the-intermittent-slow-logon-or-slow-startup.aspx
cheers
Romanus