Windows Explorer Speed across a network

[Richard Speiss]

My wife and I have our computer networked at home (Windows XP Home, Pentium
2.2+ computers, 100 megabit cards, and CAT5 wiring).
My wife's computer store all of our photos from our digital camera.
When I need to edit a file, I would browse her computer file and copy the
selected photo back to my computer.
This worked fine


My computer used to have 512 MB of RAM it.
I recently upgraded it to 1 Gigabyte to help do some photo editing.
Now, when I browse my wife's computer to get a photo it is extremely slow
(minutes instead of seconds).

Admittedly there are a lot of photos but they are in subfolders. The
slowdown happens when I just browse the root of the photos folder (e.g.
\\WifesComputer\C\Photos).

I thought this was really strange. I removed the extra RAM out of my
computer and I was able to browse her computer fast again.

I put the RAM back in and instant slowdown browsing her computer.

I tried turning off the thumbs.db creation and making sure that I am not
browsing in the thumbnail view but it is still very slow.

Does anyone have any idea why Windows would be slowing down so much?

Thanks

Richard Speiss

 

[Bob_B]

If anything you would think that performance would
inprove with the addition of the additional ram. If you
are fairly certain that the RAM is the culprit, then I
would check to see what type of RAM you purchased. I
assume that you bought another 512 stick to make 1Gig, so
was it the same type of ram, speed etc??... For instance
is one PC133 and the other PC2100? Both sticks really
need to be the same speed/type. Also I am assumming that
you "see" the 1Gig when the computer bios starts up in
the begining, so you know it is installed correctly.

Basically, if it works fine before you added the RAM, and
now with the RAM in works very slow, but taking it out
makes it woirk fine again.... it seems that that may be
the problem.

 

[Richard Speiss]

I actually removed my old RAM and just put in 2 new 512MB sticks of RAM.
They are definitely the same type, speed, etc (identical actually). The
really strange thing is that things have not slowed down on my local
computer. It is only while browsing the remote computer that this symptom
arises. This leads me to not suspect the RAM per se but some program that
has decided that it has extra memory and is going to make full use of it.

I will keep looking

Thanks for the thoughts

Richard