Slow Network Browsing

[throwaway098]

Currently there are about 45+ computers on the network. 85% of them are windows XP machines. The rest are simple Win98 machines set up to be a datacollection machine for the plant, or used to d/l engineering programs to the machines. So here is the problem, we have many shares set up on our Win2k3 Domain Controller. The Windows XP machines take FOREVER to find the shares/mapped drives that are set up. We recently replace our switches to new 3COM's and about 50% of the people on the network noticed a difference. The rest did not. It seems when they go to click on a directory, it is always trying to refresh or there is just too much traffic.

Any help is wanted! Thanks!

 

[bcastner]

Have you removed the search for scheduled tasks yet?

In regedit navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\
Explorer\Remote Computer\NameSpace

And delete the following key:
{D6277990-4C6A-11CF-8D87-00AA0060F5BF}

Close regedit and reboot.

 

[throwaway098]

Yup, I've got that far. I've also been researching some more on the registry and how connecting to a Win98 Machine from Xp is just normally a pain.

I have a few ideas, but just wondered if anyone else had this experience.

 

[bcastner]

The fix I first mentioned:

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=245800

"...and how connecting to a Win98 Machine from Xp is just normally a pain."

This is ordinarily not true. It might be wiser to take the data collection output from the Win98 machine and copy it up to the Windows 2003 server, or write it there to begin with, rather than host it on the Windows98 machine as a local fileshare for 45+ clients.

Are the Win98 machines registering with the DNS server of the Win2003 DC? Or are you depending completely on Netbios name resolution?

Have you upgraded the XP boxes to SP2? The redirector is incredibly faster than pre-SP2 implementations.

 

[throwaway098]

The plan is to eventually put ALL of the data onto another Windows 2003 Server. At this time, our only server hosts our database, which is very sensitive. So hopefully soon, we can upgrade to another server and when this occurs all of the data will be hosted by a server.

To my knowledge, they are in the DNS. Is there anyway to test the DNS or NETBIOS names? But there is the possibility that it is using the Netbois names...I'll look into that later today.

Yes, the XP boxes are up to SP2.

 

[garychamberland]

I had a similar problem although not with so many Win98 boxes. As it turns out the problem was that after making some changes, some of the locations that the mapped drives pointed to did not exist on the network anymore. The PCs would take forever trying to connect to these drives until they timed out(for each drive).

Hope this helps.