Networking Problem? Not sure...help me troubleshoot this! :-)

[Gouki]

Hey guys..

Here's the situation. I work in a small office with 3 systems networked together using a 4-port hub. The one system is a 40mhz (we use it as a print server) and is running windows 3.x the other 2 main systems are both running 98 SE. Both the main systems are more up to "speed" then the print server. The boss's computer is a Pentium III 667 with 256mb of ram and mine's an AMD Duron 750 with 256mb.

A little over a week ago I started having problems with the main program that we use here at work. Opening files, closing, printing, saving...all of these operations started to take forever. By that I mean upwards of one minute (forever in my book). lol. The reason why I think this is a network problem is because all of the files are stored on the bosses computer. That particular folder is mapped on my computer as a seperate drive and whenever I need to work on them I'm pulling them from his computer. I tried copying a report or two over to my machine (this also took way too long, 4 minutes for a 4mb file) and then working on the report locally. All the symptoms of my problem disappeared. The reports opened/closed/sav within seconds and the lag is all but gone.

So to me that says it's a networking issue. To my knowledge we didn't make any changes to any of the network settings, if it ain't broke don't fix it, ya know? So I'm wondering if these problems are because one of our NIC's is failing? Or maybe the hub is about to crap out? Ideas?

I've got an extra NIC and hub at my apt...but just haven't had time to look for them and try to switch them out with the systems at work...

For right now what we're doing is moving the files over to my machine, I do what I need to do for the reports then once I'm done, move them back over to his machine. We're getting by...but it was so much nicer when the network was working properly.

[Epidemic]

silly question did your boss reboot his machine around the time that the problem subsided?

I had that happen once in my office where I use another machine as a file server.

Secondly do you folks reboot religiously or just on a crash... like me...

[Gouki]

Typically we only reboot after a crash. And since we're running 98SE...that's at least once every other day. lol. That and if the program we use decides to crash...then we *have* to reboot in order to get the program running again.

But anyways...this has been going on for over a week and the problems don't seem to go away even after a reboot. lol. Which leads me to believe that it's hardware related.

*note* as an aside...I'm running XP Professional on my system at home. So far my record uptime is 3 weeks, 3 days. lol. Best I ever did with 98SE was 4 days. I've convinced the boss that we should upgrade to XP...it's just a matter of finding a slow day so we can actually do it!