How to Speed up Your Login Times

Unless this is your first year at 219, you heard this before: Long login times are related to big roaming profiles.

First, a brief explanation. What is a Roaming Profile?
You probably have seen it. There is a folder in your J: drive named “Profile.V2” This folder contains your “roaming profile” (the things that follow you from computer to computer: your settings, desktop items, shortcuts, etc.). Every time you login, this folder is copied to your local hard drive. This behavior is normal and required by Windows 7 OS in a network structure.

The problem. 
Many of us, for convenience, will save documents, pictures or even whole directories right on the desktop. The desktop items are part of the roaming profile and get saved directly into the “PROFILE.V2” folder. Since this folder gets copied back and forth between the server and your computer every time that you log in and out... the larger the folder gets, the longer it takes for you to log in and out. By the way, shortcuts on your desktop are only 1 Kb, so you can have as many shortcuts as you need without any impact in your login times.

The Solution. 
It is very simple. Limit the number of files and folders left on your desktop and remembers that you can create as many shortcuts as you need. Keeping files and folders on the desktop may be  convenient but have the side effect of slowing you down. You can still enjoy the convenience of quickly getting to your files by creating shortcuts on the desktop but  leaving the originals in your J: drive.

Give it a try... I’m sure you’ll be glad you did it!

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