For reasons that are not relevant to my questions, my employer makes us all take our laptops home every night. So every morning we have to put our laptops on the docking station and boot up.
Fortunately, the PCs boot up relatively quickly, but all of our work (documentation, application, email, ftp) is all on the network. For some reason the network adapters (ethernet and wireless) are the very last things to load.
First of all, does everything startup right away, but it just take a long time to bring the adapters up? Or are they serial and they are just the last in the line?
If they are last in line, is there someway to put them at the beginning of the line so I’m not stuck staring at my screen waiting for them to come up?
Ethernet adapters should establish their links before Windows finishes loading. Wireless adapters usually connect after Windows finishes loading but on some adapters you can instruct them to connect before login (to allow you to log on to a domain using a wireless connection), this is usually set in the properties of the adapter under Network Connections in the Control Panel.
In your case it may be that the adapters are connecting fast enough but your network drives are set up as part of a login script that takes a while to run. For example before a shortcut to an application on R: drive can be run the R: drive needs to be connected, which may be done as part of a lengthier script that takes a while to complete.