W2K Terminal Srv client has serious "lag" problem.

[kdwalker]

Please help! I have set up a W2K Active Directory domain for a school system with one domain controller and three 2000 Terminal servers, with each Term server servicing MS Office 2000 to about 25 students. When all or most of the students log on the Terminal services, they complain that there is a bad "lag". In other words, when they start typing something in Word, the characters on the screen do not "keep up with" the students' fingers. I have spoken with Microsoft about this problem, and since then I made sure that the installation of Office, using the Transforms, was correct. I also removed McAfee from the clients. I have scoured Technet and read TS books, but I can not find the answer to this problem.
The clients are W95, 98, and ME, and are all PIII machines. The servers and the clients are more than powerful enough to handle the load. Someone please help, the customer is getting frustrated, and so am I. Thanks

 

[DaveNamou]

Try enabling "Local Text Echo" on the client. And try to disable auto spellcheck and auto grammer check. Dave Namou, MCSE CCEA

 

[Highland]

What is the Network Set-up...???? Is anything else taking place on the network...??? Is there always a "lag"..?? Can you try connecting a Client PC to the same switch as one of the Terminal Servers and see if its still "slow"..???

 

[kdwalker]

This network is self-contained and is not connected to the Internet or to any other network. The only traffic should be MS Office. This is a switched 100mb network using only TCP/IP. The problem only occurres when 15-25 or more people are logged into a session and using an application, such as Word.
Any ideas? Thanks

 

[Highland]

Have you tried checking the Performance Monitor on the Terminal Server...??? What does it show before you get the problem and after....??? Its also worth checking the network card statistics on the server....??? Anytime I've seen this problem before it turned out to be a network issue...

Are all the clients affected....??? Are they all using the same type of Nic and driver...???

 

[paulwatsonscc]

You really have to determine what the server load is like at time the servers appear to be slow. There maybe a resource bottleneck.

Also features in office such as background grammer and spell checking, Autosave, Menu animations, office assistants etc should be disabled as these eat up server resource.

 

[kdwalker]

Thanks for tips. I noticed that all of the clients had on-board video that was using system RAM (the video has no memory of it's own). If I set the video at 256 colors instead of the 16bit high color setting, the problems went away. This causes complaints when running local apps, but I've told them if they want more than 256 on the desktop, to upgrade to video cards that have on-board memory.

 

[mjv1061]

Try updating the SCSI Controller on the Windows 2000 Servers. I had a similar problem, and after finding updted SCSI controller drivers, the porblem went away. My problem was with Compaq ML370 server. Hope this helps.