Alice 2.2B - very slow startup on school network.

I teach in a high school setting and upon returning to the classroom after our summer break, Alice is taking 4 to 5 minutes to startup on all 30 computers. Alice started very quickly before the break.

My home computer, in the same community, is starting Alice in 10 to 20 seconds. Obviously on my Cable network connection, not the school's network connection.

The school computers are running Windows 7. The latest version of Alice 2.2B is installed. I even tried rolling back the version, but still had a very long startup time. Java is updated.

My question, does Alice make any connections to the internet during startup? My initial guess is that some connection is not being made (or is being blocked) and this is slowing down the initial startup as Alice tries to make a connection somewhere.

Any suggestions or solutions would be appreciated.

[David B]

Are the machines networked? (I have no idea what that means, but I bet somebody here does, and I also bet that that is what is slowing your loading speed.)

The Computers are networked.

Alice is running off of a local drive on each computer. Student projects are also stored locally on the computer.

To give more information...After starting Alice, the startup screen shows up and stays on the screen for a much longer time than normal (I initially thought Alice was frozen). Eventually, after about 4-5 minutes, the startup screen disappears and the "Welcome to Alice" screen appears. Everything runs fine after that.

The excessively long startup time is what I am trying to solve.

[David B]

I am afraid that you will have to wait until someone else discovers this thread. I am afraid that I can't help you with that. Sorry. I was just curious to know if they were networked.