Under Windows 7 the first user logon usually takes less then 35 seconds for each user and the initial user profile weighs approx. 5MB. With Windows 10 this has increased dramatically. The first user logon now usually takes up to 2 minutes or more for each user and the resulting user profile weighs approx. 130MB!

Most of this increase can be attributed to:

• the Windows 10 “Modern Apps” (also called Modern UI) which have to be created for each user at first logon
• the initial setup of Microsoft “OneDrive”
• many other one time background processes which continue to run for a long time until all necessary Modern UI resources have been created after the first user logon process has already completed
• Live tile creation and initial setup for the new Windows 10 Start menu
• initial setup of the Windows Store database etc.

Unfortunately this overhead consumes a lot of additional CPU and RAM resources for Windows 10 user logons, especially in multiuser environments like Thinstuff XP/VS Terminal Server.

With some Google research you can easily find many instructions about how to remove Modern Apps with PowerShell commands and limit the Windows 10 start menu to one single tile, creating a slim default user profile, etc.

Microsoft knows about this bottle-neck and has released a “slim” Windows 10 version called “Windows 10 LTSB (Long-Term Service Branch)” where almost all of the above mentioned overhead has been removed (also bringing back the old Windows 7-style calculator). Some reports about Windows 10 LTSB can be found <a href=“https://forum.level1techs.com/t/really-impressed-with-windows-10-ltsb/112714“ target=“_blank“ rel=“noopener noreferrer“>here</a>.

Unfortunately Windows 10 LTSB is only available for Microsoft Enterprise customers.

Fortunately even the cheapest Microsoft Server OS “Windows Server 2016 Essentials” also offers the same reduced overhead and remarkable performance improvements as Windows 10 LTSB, but without its restrictions.