Network or Hardware issue?!

[ironmunk]

This is a strange one.

If a user is logged on and has his/her computer on for the whole night, the next day there is extensive amounts of bottlenecking when using Microsoft Office products for that user. Ex. When a user tries to open a word document it will open in the normal amout if time, but the blinking cursor will remain still and non blinking for 5 mins and when you try to get focus with the cursor in another position on the page, it takes 5 - 10 mins. Task manager on the server nor the client does not show any evidents of maximum CPU usage, however, it appears this is happening.

Another weird situation is that when a user tries to open up a power point file that is resident on the server, the servers CPU usage jumps to 100%. It jumps back down when the power point file opens, but when you try to save, browse, modify the file the server's CPU usage jumps back up to 100%

Please comment

File Server is Microsoft Small Business Server
Client workstations are Windows XP Pro and Office XP Pro

 

[Catadmin]

Is this happening to one user specifically or multiple users? If it's happening to one user, the same user, all the time, it might be specific to that workstation. Are there any other applications running at the time on either the server or the workstation?

What about the connection between the two? Is it direct network or through a router? It might be a matter of a network card or switch starting to go out.

Catadmin - New to Server Admin, but willing to learn... All help is appreciated.

 

[DDILL]

Try using performance monitor to monitor Memory, CPU, and Network

 

[ironmunk]

This is happening to multiple users. All users are experiencing this. Their are no applications that are running in the background of the workstation nor server that uses a huge chumk of memory.

The connection of the network is through a hub. I highly doubt that it has anything to do with the NIC becasue I already replaced the existing NIC with a new one.

I thought also that it might be the hub, but determined that it was not because when I open the file locally on the server, it behaves the same way.

I don't know if this will help, but I am also experiencing further strange behaviours in regards to power point presentations. When a user goes into a directory (maybe a specific directory) in windows explorer on the server, with only power point presentations files, and DON'T open or launch the files, but only click around from file to file. This makes the CPU usage on the server jump to 100%. This is very strange seeing that the files are not even opened, but yet uses up maximum resources on the server.

Note: I changed the NIC 2 days ago and upgraded the RAM to a total of 1.5 Gigs

Help please !!!

 

[lck092580]

Does this problem go away when u restart the workstations?

 

[ironmunk]

The word issue does go away once the client PC's are reboot. The powerpoint issue does not.

 

[lck092580]

I'm not familiar with XP but MS markets it by assuring us that it's built on win2k so i'm going to assume it knows when to release memory when a program closes.. i'll also a assume that there's no virus.. I would have told you to use task manager to check for suspicious progs hogging up memory but u have so much ram already..

Have you checked with the known bugs on MS's site?.. it could be a office XP bug (just a guess cuz i may be totally wrong). Sorry I couldn't help.

T

 

[ironmunk]

Lck092580 thanks for your help anyways.