Laptop slow to boot

[aleinss]

Hi guys.

Wondering if anyone out there has ran into this issue. We have sales
guys that take their laptops out on the road with them, specifically
these are Dell D600/D610s. Any ways, they bring them back into
corporate and the laptop takes 3 to 4 minutes to bring up the Novell
login screen. During this time there is very little disk activity. If
I disable the onboard wireless card, the laptop boots up very fast to
the Novell login screen. If I check the event log, the laptop is
trying to get a DHCP address from someone's private wireless access
point. Only one person has access to this WAP, so the attempt fails.
Unfortunately, the laptop waits 3 to 4 minutes trying to obtain a DHCP
address from this WAP and times out.

It doesn't matter if it plugged into Ethernet or not. It seems to
want to grab an IP address for the wireless card even if it already has
an Ethernet connection. The interesting thing is that if I clear all
of the wireless profiles out of the laptop and reboot, it boots up
really fast. However, when they go back on the road and start hitting
hotels and other places that host their own WAPs, the sales guys come
back with a bunch of wireless profiles and the process starts all over
again.

I did try updating the drivers, but still happens. This is happening
to all the sales guys with laptops.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Adam

 

[Mr C]

IT sounds like the laptops are seeing the SSID broadcast by the private
WAP and trying to link to it. Unfortunately for you, if you stop the
laptops from doing that the sales guys won't have much use of them
while out on the road. You could try setting up Hardware Profiles, one
that uses the WNIC while they're out on the road and another that uses
wired for when they're at base or... a piece of software called
Multi-Network Manager by Globesoft (http://www.globesoft.com/). I am a
mobile ICT Manager and I've found this little piece of code a great
help (except for having to reboot for various profiles). It offers you
a variety of profiles to use while out and about. Just configure one
profile with WNIC enabled for the road and another with the WNIC
disabled for base. Added bonus with MNM is you can export the profiles
and import them onto other laptops instead of having to recreate them
for every user or every upgrade.

Mr C.

After serious thinking (e-mail address removed) wrote :