Desktop Services Team

We have come up with a number of scenarios to test what happens if we change our current printing setup. We are investigating the consequences of removing the group policy printers policy as we are aware that this increases login time.

Initial investigations have been positive and we are collating what impact this has on login time and what we need to be aware of should we decide to turn this off. We will be carrying out further tests on a larger group of computers to confirm our findings on our sample machine are representative.

The machine retrieved from Dartington House was uresponsive during the morning so we ran the following tests to confirm this wasn’t due to hardware fault.

•   Hard Drive scan – the results showed the hard drive was in working order.

•  Cputemp application – temp reporting at 24^○C so not overheating

•  Windows assessment console – tested all drivers installed on the machine. Reported back a number of unused drivers and an error with a USB stick that was plugged in.

•  Memory test – the results showed the memory was in working order.

We’ve installed the MS toolkit on a test machine to allow us to record what is happening on the background on this machine. This will help us see what is going on when the machine becomes unresponsive and also going forward provide us with useful information on our setup and configuration.

We’ve setup a test machine in our offices and performed login benchmarking. This machine was swapped out with a slow running machine in one of the meeting rooms in Dartington House so we can carry out further tests using a machine with reported problems.

There was no noticeable difference in login time between the 2 locations.