The Underscore Archives

Afternoon all,

 

I need a bit of advice / an educated guess - our systems here can be
very slow from time to time and it isn't great for business.

 

The setup:

 

We have an HP Proliant ML350 G4 (specs - http://tinyurl.com/2jcw8w)
running Small Business Server 2003 and about 25 - 30 PCs running XP Pro
connected over an Ethernet 100Mb/s network. There are two internet
connections - ADSL and SDSL, although I am not sure that's relevant.

 

Sometimes, it runs OK, but never fast and every now and then it almost
completely stops. Switching between applications usually takes quite a
bit of time and this gets worse if Outlook is involved. But, this
happens even with applications that have definitely only been installed
locally (I installed Firefox straight away obviously).

 

The question:

 

Which part of the setup is likely to be the problem? Surely switching
between applications is a client PC RAM deficiency or something like
that? How could it relate to network speed or server speed? I guess
email problems are attributed to the server speed, or maybe the internet
connection. Do we have a strong enough server to handle this load?

 

An advice / guessing / general discussion very gratefully received.

 

Love,

 

Ben.x