WinXP Network Speed Question

[maxparot]

Change the NIC on the slow computer

[wreckwriter]

Change the NIC on the slow computer

I think this is a good idea at this point. NICs are dirt cheap and by changing it out you pretty much eliminate it as being the problem.

[LarryG]

Change the NIC on the slow computer

He already has, on both XP machines. They have the NIC built into the mobo. He disabled those in the BIOS and installed add-in NICs (PCIs, presumably). Made no difference.

I did some Googling yesterday afternoon and came up with a few possible leads to which I pointed him to see if they would help. It looks like it MIGHT have something to do with XP automatically browsing the network for shared resources ... I found a number of people reporting the same problem (right down to the exact same delay, of 10 to 12 seconds) but it was unclear whether the suggested fixes actually worked. I'll report back as soon as I hear from him.

[LarryG]

My colleague tried some of the stuff I found with Google. Still no improvement. He says at this point he's basically tired of fooling with it and is going to back-burner it. If anyone has any flashes of inspiration they'd care to pass along, it would be appreciated.

One last, new piece of info: he says that files in the Recent Files list open much quicker, i.e. at the expected speed, than files navigated to via the Open File dialog. This happens even after the machine has been rebooted. Could this be because the data is still in the swap file, maybe?

[Jamb]

Could be a computer browsing issue. Once you have a file loaded, open an other one from the same folder. Is it opening faster? Try to create a mapped drive to the folder where the CAD files are stored and access them through that shortcut.
You may experience some delay during startup. That's because if you have any mapped drives defined, XP tries to connect to those drives during startup/logon.

[RayintheUK]

I agree with Jamb, it's likely to be a browsing issue. Anything in the Event Logs on any machine reporting "Master Browser" problems - where one believes it is the master browser, then another one does, so the browsing services stop while an election is forced? This takes about the time delay you report.

Is browstat.exe loaded on all machines (resource kit application)? If so, go to a prompt and type browstat sta <enter> to see which machine holds the master browser title and see if any conflicts show up. You can edit the parameters in the registry if there are two or more machines which are configured as master browsers.

While the prompt is open, type ipconfig /all <enter> to see details of the default gateway, DHCP server and DNS servers. At least you should be able to check one machine against the other to make sure there's not some other routing difficulty involved.

Ray.

[onedash]

Does the QoS do anything to speed up regular connections to the internet?
I just had the cable guy out to the house. Had to fix a cable. I was without internet two days. He said my modem is old and probably doesnt get full performance all the time but when he check up and down load speeds it was what I pay for. 5 Down 2 up. Could upgrade to 15 down but dont see a need right now.