After Using MDS laptop is REALLY slow

I recently used MDS to image 31 MBAs. Fairly simple build of macOS Mojave, between 8-12 packages (including Adobe, SMART Notebook, Epson Brightlink SW, and MS Office for Mac), no scripts, creating an admin account upon install, not binding to a domain, etc. Machine boots up fine. I can add a second user to the machine no problem. I have added a few additional applications after the fact due to installation requirements (CrashPlan and AlertUs). Every single one is slower than death! Office has a spinning wheel of death when trying to execute anything, even just a short line of typed text. Other applications are slow to open, even if they open. Sometimes the laptop just has the spinning wheel and does nothing. These are MacBook Air (2017), 1.6, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD drives. At first I was thinking maybe a hard drive failure. But I have completely wiped an identical machine, installed everything like it was out of the box and no issues. I even did the same to a machine with the issues and its fine.

Am I missing something? I am a little perplexed…

Thanks for any suggestions,
Karen

It sounds like something going on with either permissions or one of the packages was bad. I would create a work flow with just the OS installed and Admin account set up; then an OS with some/half/almost all the packages installed. See if it is one of the packages that is causing the issue.

Are you installing tons of Fonts?

Adam

MDS uses the standard installer from macOS so it shouldn’t vary significantly from a standard install, though as @zoocropolis said, it could be related to packages. I have seen very strange things like a corrupt background image making odd behavior (thought this was a long time ago).

tim

It makes total sense!

I definitely did not deploy the image w/packages and include a background so obviously I can rule that out. I did take a look at a current laptop that a faculty complained about and began removing things one by one. I feel like I started to see better performance once a driver for a Konica Bizhub was removed as well as MS Office 2019 for Mac. I installed both of these packages from scratch. The true test will happen once I hand the laptop back.

I will continue to experiment with your suggestions and feel pretty confident an answer will show itself. Thanks for the feedback on this.
Karen

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