by Nigel Williamson, Head of IS&T, and Simon Alexander, Networks and Infrastructure
We’re always looking for ways to improve students’ experiences of using IT at the University. Recently we’ve been working on some ways to speed up start up and log in times for computers on campus.
We’ve done three things to make things quicker.
- We’ve we have rewritten some of the start-up scripts and disabled some unnecessary programmes to dramatically cut the amount of time it takes for a computer to turn on.
- We’ve set up the computers to remember user-profiles for longer. This means that if a student logs in to a PC they have used within the past week, they will experience a faster login because the computer does not need to create and configure the profile first.
- We’ve reduced the amount of software on quick access PCs. Some of the longer start-up times were due to the large range of software packages on our managed desktop. We decided to remove some of these on the quick access computers to make them faster. Students mainly use these PCs for emails, browsing the internet and Microsoft Office work so keeping the suite of software to a minimum makes sense.
