Help: Peer to peer network problem.

[Dana]

Hiya:
Had a problem with the boss's computer today. What we have is a small peer
to peer network, all computers 5 computers are XP, with P6 processors. My
boss complained that his computer was slow. I found out his ram chip 128M,
was only letting computer use 80M of ram. The Ram was defective, and since
the boss has a nice p6 1600, I convinced him to getting some more Ram
anyway. So now he went out and got two 512M ram ddr chips. Well that really
fixed his speed problem. But then we noticed that on the peer to peer
network, which really was not used prior to today, on just the boss's
computer when he tries to open either a word doc, pdf file, or access
database from another computer on the network, the application hangs, and
even using task manager is difficult to kill the process. Using the same
network connection to access the internet gives no problem at all. And now
with the increased ram, his load time of pages is just great. It is only
trying to access documents over the peer to peer network where applications
hang. Can anyone give any pointers into what I should look at. All the other
computers are working fine, and they can open and read documents of the
boss's computer. While on the peer to peer network, and during the
application trying to run, CPU utilization does not go out of normal/typical
usage, but I did notice that there is hardly any network transfer speed.
Might be reading at about .3, to 0.
Thanks

 

[xe77]

Your new RAM may be faulty.
www.memtest86.com

 

[Dana]

Your new RAM may be faulty.
www.memtest86.com

I at first thought the same. And tried known good ram. Same problem. Come to
find out, the Boss has had this problem for months, and since we are a small
avionics shop, he did not use the peer to peer network in the office that
often. Hence he never worried about it. He only complained when his internet
connection really bogged down, and that ended up being the defective RAM.
But now we need to actually have his computer be able to access quickbooks
over the local network, and that is when I noticed the problem, and later he
tells me that problem has been there for months.

 

[rifleman]

Dana cogitated deeply and scribbled thusly:

Hiya:
Had a problem with the boss's computer today. What we have is a small peer
to peer network, all computers 5 computers are XP, with P6 processors. My
boss complained that his computer was slow. I found out his ram chip 128M,
was only letting computer use 80M of ram. The Ram was defective, and since
the boss has a nice p6 1600, I convinced him to getting some more Ram
anyway. So now he went out and got two 512M ram ddr chips. Well that really
fixed his speed problem. But then we noticed that on the peer to peer
network, which really was not used prior to today, on just the boss's
computer when he tries to open either a word doc, pdf file, or access
database from another computer on the network, the application hangs, and
even using task manager is difficult to kill the process. Using the same
network connection to access the internet gives no problem at all. And now
with the increased ram, his load time of pages is just great. It is only
trying to access documents over the peer to peer network where applications
hang. Can anyone give any pointers into what I should look at. All the other
computers are working fine, and they can open and read documents of the
boss's computer. While on the peer to peer network, and during the
application trying to run, CPU utilization does not go out of normal/typical
usage, but I did notice that there is hardly any network transfer speed.
Might be reading at about .3, to 0.
Thanks

Presumably all the machines in the workgroup show up in Network Places?

 

[Malke]

Dana cogitated deeply and scribbled thusly:

Presumably all the machines in the workgroup show up in Network
Places?

Presumably his computer (and by extension, the network) is clean from
viruses and other malware?

Malke

 

[Charles C. Drew]

Try downloading, installing and running AdAware and SpyBot. I've discovered
that spyware can cause strange problems just like viruses can. I once
(recently) found 6 spyware programs on a friend's machine and fixed a
serious crash and hang problem he had everytime he booted his machine.
Another friend couldn't get his printer to work until we found and removed a
spyware program that said it was a spyware remover.

Do your machines have anti-virus software on them? If not, your boss could
easilly have virus infections as well. Get a good one like Norton
Anti-Virus or AVG anti-virus (http://www.grisoft.com) if you need something
for free.