How to Truly Speed Up Windows Login Time with one Registry entry
This was discovered when i was looking for a way to speed up login times for windows 10.
We already looked removing the universal apps that ship with windows 10, and a few other tricks here or there to get log in time to down from 1:20 to 30 - 50 seconds. still that is good from what i have read online.
however while we was implementing VMware Horizon i wondered if the log in time could be decreased even further.
What i think is going on here is there is a hard set timer, on when to show the desktop. Even though you remove the APPs that have to be installed for when each user logs in. and you make other modications as well, it does not matter. There is a hard set limit Somewhere in windows that says do not show the desktop until X amount of time has passed.
Setting DelayedDesktopSwitchTimeout seems to decrease login time to 10 seconds in out envoirment. Both VDI and on workstations.
Keep in mind tho while this does appear to speed up login times, it can show the desktop to the enduser, before its fully ready.
Documentation:
In doing some reseach for writing this up it appeas more detials have been relased on DelayedDesktopSwitchTimeout on some Microsoft Documentation and on some blogs.
Windows 10 VDA exhibits slow logon at Welcome screen
Solution:
i added the registry key to a batch file to be deployed via SCCM, i also have it in my VDI settings script that i run before i snapshot my golden image for VDI.
For some reason you cannot have it run during Operating system deployment (OSD). while the script will write the reg key to "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System" after OSD is completed there is some house cleaning that SCCM does in area that will remove the entry.
This is why i deploy it afterwards useing the applicaiton model so i can detect that the entry was successfully created.