We are upgrading our Notes clients to 8.5 FP1. It works well on desktops but on laptops it takes three to four minutes to load up each time they start Notes. Once Notes loads up, it’s fine but the users are, of course, complaining. We do not include Symphony, the Office Suite, with the installation of Notes.
We’ve advised them to use Notes Basic which loads much quicker but some users prefer the look of Notes Standard.
Even with clean installation (not an upgrade) the 8.5 client takes as long to load on the laptops. The laptops exceed the system requirements. The one user I’m working with has 4 GB or ram and a dual core 2.4 Ghz processor.
Any suggestions on how to get Notes to load faster or what the solution is?
One thing I found that helped a lot was to defragment the Notes directory, specficially. If you google for “contig” by SysInternals, you run that from a command prompt within the directory you want (or put the exe in your path). Then you can just defrag Notes. On my laptop, Notes startup went from 2 minutes to about 25 seconds.
IBM are also supposed to be providing me with some registry keys that pre-cache Eclipse code during OS start to improve Notes load times, but I haven’t been given that info yet.
Another thing, is make sure the ODS of names.nsf etc is ODS 51 (ncompact -c from command prompt, don’t forget to add CREATE_R85_DATABASES=1 to notes.ini). Not sure how you can mass deploy that without a headache though, it’s better done one machine at a time if you don’t have too many.
In addition to Phillip’s excellent suggestions, is your anti-virus configuration different for the laptops? Try excluding your Notes program directory from the real-time scan of your anti-virus software.
Reg key as supplied to me by IBM - idea being to pre-cache code during boot, to allow Notes client to start faster. Your mileage my vary, I haven’t seen a huge improvement but every little helps:-
As per IBM:
The way I would expect it to be used would be to add it to the Run area in the registry:
Local Machine\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Run
New string value:
Name - PreloaderNotes
Data - fully qualified path to the exe “C:\Program Files\Lotus\Notes\nntspreld.exe”
Many large corporations are running encryption on laptops so that data is secure should the laptop be lost/stolen. The encryption software has overhead.
