windows 7 iscsi variable boot times - could ixpe be causing it?

[sebastian]

I have a similiar "problem", the "Windows flag" screen takes exactly 1.30 from the Point it shows "Starting Windows" until the screen disappear for the Windows login screen to show.
But this apples BOTH to Cold and Warm boots, eg no boot is faster for me.

Three key Points to make:
The screen shows off without any Windows flag logo, only the text "Starting Windows". (T=0.00)
At (T=1.00) the Windows flag appears and start animating (the 4 dots that join together into a Windows 7 Flag).
At (T=1.30), the screen becomes black. A few seconds later the Windows login screen appears.

The link speed for me is 1000MBIT (gigabit).

My conclusion: I Think this is because first, the windows boot from a virtual local device created by iPXE (Since Windows boot loader does not support iSCSI at all), eg iPXE hands over boot to Windows boot loader, and Windows Thinks its booting from a local drive, while all disk data is sent through iPXE, which in turn sends it to iSCSI target. When the actual Windows boot is taking over, the boot will be done with Windows 7 native iSCSI client, which will talk directly to iSCSI target without talking to iPXE, thus gaining a magnitude in speed increase, thats why the actual inside-Windows-Experience is pretty fast, and disk access have a Windows Experience Index of 6.5 for me. (7.9 is max)

The reason you get a fast first-boot might have with network card configuration to do. As you see in my thread, some motherboard to not do a complete chip reset on the network NVRAM configuration space when asked to do it: http://forum.ipxe.org/showthread.php?tid=7216
It might have to do with the motherboard chip-type/architecture (Z87).

My solution to the "problem":
I downloaded Windows 7 Boot Logo Changer:
http://www.coderforlife.com/projects/win7boot/#Download

Then I changed the boot logo text and logo so it explicity said: "The computer is downloading files from our server." "This may take up to 5 minutes." "Please be very patient!"
Note that the boot logo changer does only support 2 lines of text, but more text can be easily added by simply telling it to use "raw" mode where you set a background Picture containing text instead.
Note here that I told it that the computer may take up to 5 minutes instead of 1.5 minutes. By specifying a longer time than it really takes, the users will be more patient actually. They will be prepared to wait 5 minutes but it takes much faster.

This means it does not matter that the computer is slow at boot, and user will not Think it "hanged".