Deployment Solution

Ok let's see if I can explain this properly. I start off with a great running start when the PXE boot menu loads. Next I pick my Win PE 2.1 automation disk from the menu. This is where it crawls. It takes 15 miutes to load into PE on the Dell 760, most models take a minute or so. Now I finally get to the point where it loads the NIC drivers and so on and can map to the express share. This does not happen with our older Dell or HP workstations. My previous version of Altiris 6.9 SP1 had this problem as well so I decided to refresh my install. I think this may have to do with VPRO as they have a full rev in this model, but I am just guessing.

What I have done so far.
I upgraded to the latest Altiris 6.9 SP2 and Upgraded my PE enviornment to SP 2.
I verified that TPM is disabled
I tried all of the Hard Drive options STATA, etc.

Any ideas?

I've got the same slowness issues with my 760s as well. Mine don't take 15 minutes to get into WinPE, but are noticeably slower when booting into automation and when copying files as part of my imaging job. 

That said, take a quick look at KB 39085. It details this issue with the 755s which, I'd assume, are likely to have similar problems.  I wouldn't be surprised if Dell neglected to carry over the BIOS correction to the 760s.

If you haven't already done so, try upping your packet size in PXE Manager. To do so, go to the multicast tab and and up your packet size to 1400.  This will actually speed up the PE download times for all of your workstations.

You could also try downloading the vendor's drivers for the NIC and adding them to your PE boot image. If you need help with that, there's a good guide published in KB 22523.

Out of these options, upping the packet size seemed to have the most significant impact for me. My 760s are still slower than other models but not as drastically as they once were.

Hope this helps!

Same here.  I've already tried the suggestions that Mike has listed in the past but things are still somewhat slow as compared to our other systems.  What's intersting is that our older models like the Optiplex 270 and Optiplex 280 load about twice as fast as our 760.

I just found on a Citrix Forum that there is an issue with the 760's bios Ver. A02.  Reports of slow boot up with this version.  Dell published a new version A03 on June 16.

I have been having an issue with the 760 booting to a PXE boot menu, where the PXE boot was timing out.  I am downloading the new BIOS and will be testing this week.

Hope this helps you.

EJ