Why does it take so long for an NMCI machine to boot up? Exactly what is the machine doing when it boots? Does anyone know?
We took a small sampling of boot up times for both laptop and desktop seats. Remember this is relatively current hardware running Windows 2000 -- not state of the art but certainly not something out of the 80s. These are average times.
Laptop -- From Boot to Login: 3 Minutes, 37 Seconds
Laptop -- From Login to Desktop: 2 Minutes, 18 Seconds
Total Unusable Time: 5 Minutes 55 Seconds
Desktop -- From Boot to Login: 3 Minutes, 30 Seconds
Desktop -- From Login to Desktop: 2 Minutes, 12 Seconds
Total Unusable Time: 5 Minutes, 42 Seconds
Of course NMCI attempts to mitigate these times by instructing users to not turn off their machines at night. Of course this flies in the face of the energy saving initiatives at many sites. More importantly, many laptop users have discovered -- the hard way -- that their laptop hard drives are not rated for continuous duty. Leaving these machines on 24 hours a day is the kiss of death for the older Dell hard drives.
It should be noted that some machines took significantly longer to boot, so much so that they were not even recorded in this sample and dismissed as aberrant. One desktop machine took over 10 minutes after log in to present a usable desktop. Several laptops on the same network at the same facility took an extra minute beyond the times shown here.
As a data point, the following times were taken from several legacy Windows XP machines running similar hardware.
From Boot to Login: 41 Seconds
From Login to Desktop: 17 Seconds
Total Unusable Time: 58 Seconds
Certainly all of these times, NMCI and Legacy, are the result of dozens of variables. It appears that the NMCI machines are interacting heavily with Domain Controllers or something else on the network during boot.
Just as long as people are counting the extra five minutes of wasted employee time (several times a day for thousands of employees) when they tout the improved efficiency of NMCI.
