My machines slowed down

[Shadow Walker]

Well, am running a cyber cafe and have only 30 desktops, all same make, same speed, same memory(RAM), same processor & same HDD capacity. But these days some machines are slowing down in the way i don't understand, I performed normal diagnostics but there was no change.

Do I need software to boost up again my machines, clients are so complaining! Thx. Shadow Walker

[Allan]

You need to be more specific. Define "slowing down". If it's an internet cafe are you saying some internet connections are slower than others? Something else? And NO - do not install any software to "boost" your machines.

[Shadow Walker]

Not the internet but the computers themselves, they take long to open up programs (I mean some of the computers not all)

[Allan]

Again, you need to provide a DETAILED explanation. EXACTLY what is going on, when did it start, what is effected, what programs, how long does it take to open them, do you have anti virus apps installed, do the programs run normally once they are open - EVERYTHING that may be relevant. If you want help, please do not make us pull teeth to help you. Also, if this is an internet cafe, what apps do your customers use other than browsers?

[Shadow Walker]

knowing the specific programs is helpless (i thinK) but all apps take long to open, though I use 360 total security as anti-virus, does the anti virus have a hand in slowing the computer??

[patio]

Yes.

If it were me i would remove 1 PC at a time and run all diagnostics on each such as RAM test HDD health etc...

[Computer_Commando]

Windows 8.0 or 8.1 on all machines?

[Shadow Walker]

Am using Windows 7

[camerongray]

What do these machines have in terms of a system to prevent customers from making changes?  IMO if a machine is in use in a public place like this it should be configured to completely reset the user profile between users and should have some sort of imaging system in place where the system can be easily rolled back to a clean state.  If the machines are just being installed and treated like regular PCs without anything like this then they are probably getting clogged up with goodness-knows-what  customers are downloading/putting on the PCs.

[DaveLembke]

Cameron beat me to what I was gonna say... Additionally in addition to what Cameron stated, if these systems are clogged up with dust and overheating, they might thermal throttle and slow. When was the last time these systems were cleaned of dust bunnys. SpeedFan can be used to look at system temperatures. Is it possible that the hard drives are stuffed with whatever downloads people had to where there is so little free space that its impacting the performance if the systems are not imaged regularly.

If you dont have an imaging system in place, I would put one in place. Its not a good thing to offer systems that could be compromised by prior users. The antivirus on them if a good line of defense but its not perfect, there are still ways to infect the systems with a zero day attack.

Each time a user logs on the profile should be clean. Empty of anything someone prior had done. When they logoff no changes saved to profile. Imaging process should be frequent, daily is best to start it all clean for the next day. Weekly at minimum I would think.

I use to use Ghost Corporate Edition to push clean images to multiple systems after training seminars at a prior employer. There would be a training seminar and we would set up workstations, and after the training was complete I would tell the Ghost image server to push the images to each workstation. Back then each image was 12GB for Windows XP systems. I did this over a gigabit network with a gigabit adapter on the image server and each workstation was on 100mbps. It took a few hours to complete due to so many systems getting the images pushed to them at the same time so it was something I would start on a Friday and leave for the night, and check back on it Saturday and shut it all down after verifying the images installed correctly to each workstation.

[camerongray]

As far as imaging systems go, I can highly recommend Fog (https://fogproject.org/).  I help run a weekly programming club for kids where we have 20 laptops that can be used on the night for the kids that don't have their own laptop with them.  I set up a Fog server which we can use to reimage the machines.  It works over PXE/Network boot so once it's set up all you need to do to image a machine is tell it to boot from the network, press a button and enter a password, for one of our laptops (which has a dual boot with Windows 8.1 Pro and Ubuntu 16.04) it takes about 5-10mins to reimage the machine.  What you can even do is set all machines to boot from the network as their first boot device, with this you can then tell Fog to reimage a group of machines (or all of them) from its web interface then simply reboot the machines to have them start the imaging process.  The other awesome benefit of such system is if you need to make a change to all the machines (such as installing a new program) - All you need to do is restore one machine to a clean state from the image, make the changes on that machine, upload the image to the server and then reload the image onto all the other machines.

All you need to run it is a machine running Linux with enough hard drive space to store the images (which are compressed down anyway so don't take up much space).  In the scenario I described above the server is just an old Intel Atom D525 with a single 250gb hard drive running Linux.  Installing Fog is pretty easy and it's largely managed through a web interface.  The only tricky part is the DHCP server settings for the network - You either need to configure your current DHCP server to have the correct options to tell machines to network boot or turn off your current DHCP server and instead use the Fog machine to handle DHCP (the latter is the default setup but in my situation I did the former since the Fog server is only connected up and powered on when it's required)

[Allan]

The OP has yet to describe with any clarity or definition exactly what the problem is. "Some apps are slow to open" is not enough to work with.

[patio]

We also have zero details on how this Cafe' is set up...

[Allan]

Right. Just one sentence posts ignoring requests for detailed info.

[patio]

I'll bet business is booming...too busy to reply...