Thrusted into W2K3

I have recently graduated from college and have been thrusted into a win2003 server environment that I am not too prepared for. My previous experience is in desktop support but now I am admin for 80+ computers (not very many but still a sizable load for a newb). I don't want to sound ungrateful b/c this is what I love but I would have felt better if there was someone around to help. The guy I was supposed to work with, set up the server then went back to Japan where he is from.

I feel the setup right now is pretty much like a house of cards. One problem I am having is when people log into their user acct it takes a really long time to get through the "loading your personal settings" screen, it doesn't do it if you log on locally. Alot people just log on as local admin b/c the last guy told whoever the pwd. That makes me uneasy so i'm gonna change the local admin pwd(which will prolly piss everyone off) but if i'm going to do that i would like to fix that logon problem.

I changed all the IP addresses to static going through the TCP/IP settings on the individual computers(is there a faster way to do that?). So it's not an IP conflict causing the problem.
I feel like it may have something to do with the way the active directory was set up but I'm not sure.

Is there anyone can lend me some advice. If the problem sounds vauge let me know and try to provide more info.

Thanks

do they have static or roaming profiles?

It sounds like roaming profiles, cause it seems not to take a long time if logged on
locally.
Check a profile, that takes particularily long to load. Which folder contains most data?
In my experience (unfortunately a while ago), I had a huge amount in the
cache-folder of the browser (internet explorer, netscape, ...) if in default
configuration. Just deleting the files is not the solution - set the cache-size
down to 1 MB or so. Note, this is just one example!

cheers

Yeap, seems to be roaming profiles. dont use roaming profiles without the proper customization -- i means that most temp files (such as IE) must be stored OUTSIDE of profile.

Thanks for the replies,
I found out that that they are local profiles and not roaming. Also I would like to add in my original post I stated that it hangs up during the "loading your personal settings" but it actually hangs up during the "applying your user settings" message. I'm not sure if that matters but just want to provide as much info as possible.
Thanks

I would suggest you do a lot of research on how User Profiles work. I read that one consultants client complained that it took anywhere from 15 to 20 minutes to log on and about the same amount of time to log off. After the consultant had done some investigating he found out that the user had more than 400MB of temporary internet files and the client was on a 10mb network. To fix this problem the consultant created a Group Policy setting, and configuring Internet Explorer to delete all temporary Internet files upon exiting. This reduced the overall profile size and immediately improved logon/logoff performance. You should look at other folders when planning to use roaming profiles such as My documents and Desktop Folders. You could advise your users to save data directly to their home network drive, or redirect both the Desktop and My Documents folders to a server to eliminate the need for the data stored within these folders to be uploaded and downloaded with the profile during logon/logoff.

Q.
I'm using Roaming Profiles and my logons are slow—how can I make things faster?


A. The speed of the logon is directly related the size of the profile and the speed of the network. There are a number of things that you can do to limit the size of the profile:
• Redirect large folders such as My Documents this will reduce the amount of data copied to/from the computer at logon and logoff.
• Exclude large folders from the roaming profile. By default large folders such as Local Settings, Temp. and Temporary Internet Files folders do not roam. You can use the "Exclude directories in roaming profile" Group Policy setting to add new folders to the exclusion list; once included in the policy these folders will not be copied to the local machine at logon, nor copied back to the server at logoff.
• Set the Slow Network timeout appropriately if you're logging on over a slow link. When a slow link is detected, the system uses the locally cached profile, rather than copying the profile from the server.
• Don't save large files inside the user profile.



Check out these links for more info:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000...anage_faq.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/pro.../09w2kadb.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/d..._overview.mspx

I figured out that the workstations were configured to the wrong DNS server.