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BridgewaterGuy

15 Posts

7000

January 21st, 2008 13:00

Performance improvement for Windows XP peer-to-peer network?

I volunteer with a small charity that three years ago upgraded its Win 98 network (ugh) to Windows XP, running peer-to-peer. The idea was to get them a low-cost, reliable network that they could troubleshoot themselves. They dedicated a single Dimension 4700 to be the "peer server," really just a single-user computer but with better specs than the Dimension B1100's that they got to be the workstations. This has all worked out reasonably well. The charity runs Office 2000 over the network and gets good-enough performance. More importantly, they don't call their volunteer technician very much. :smileyhappy:
 
Over time, however, the charity has grown dissatisfied with the performance of Access 2000 running their main database. There are several culprits, I'm sure: more individual computers on this little network, more of them running more programs including instant messaging, etc. Just experimentally, I tried reformatting and reinstalling Windows XP on one of the B1100's . . . an intern had junked it up with quite a lot of extra stuff. It ran faster but still not great. Also, I don't think periodic reformat-reinstall is a good long-term solution.
 
So here are my questions:
  1. From this limited description, what could this charity do to improve performance?
  2. Given that no one involved with the charity is proficient in Windows Server, would Windows Home Server give a boost to performance and still be easy to maintain and troubleshoot?
  3. Would faster hardware, but still running Win XP peer-to-peer, do any good?
And if the answer is, "No one knows and you have to hire an expert to find out," well, I understand that too. (On its budget, however, the charity won't hire an expert and will just soldier along on Win XP peer-to-peer.)

Rebel9

2.9K Posts

January 21st, 2008 17:00

If it's just Access that is the problem, it's probably just Access "bloat" that is slowing it down. Depending on how you have the Access database set up (best way is front end set up on the "clients" and back end set up on the "server"), close the database on a regular basis and set the option to "compact on close". This is particularly important on the "back end" mdb.

NemesisDB

2 Intern

 • 

7.9K Posts

January 22nd, 2008 12:00

I was a little unclear as well when you mentioned running office over the network?  it's installed on the local machines right?
 
Rebel's backend / frontend idea works well, though there are some other registry tweaks that can help as well if that's the specific issue?  Though it may not necessarily improve your speed (the nature of Access is that all data flows to the local front-end and gets crunched and then sent back), it should improve the reliability and usability of the system.
 
I am not sure what they're using Access for.  If you feel up for it, download the free version of SQL that MS offers and install that on the server.  Use that as the backend and create ADP files for Access to use as a front-end on the local machines.  Much more reliable and scalable -- though you lose the nice Access query editor and some other GUI features.
 
The biggest issue with running XP for the server is 1) security -- it's a pain to configure user accounts for everyone and I have a feeling you're using simple file sharing which gives full access to everyone,   and 2) scalability -- XP has a max number of active LAN connections allowed (10?) to prevent it from being used as a real server

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