I’ve got a network here that consists of a real assortment of OSes (mostly Win98), with a Novell 5 server. Any network operation involving one of the XP machines seems to involve long pauses.
The XP machines are set up with fixed IP addresses and have the latest Novell client installed, working across IP and IPX.
If I try to run a batch file that copies a block of files from the Novell server down to the XP local drive, there is a delay of up to a minute before files actually start to move.
If I try to browse the Network Neighborhood, there is often a long delay in expanding the tree to see what any given machine is sharing.
(This delay also occurs when trying to browse 98-to-XP and XP-to-XP)
The network does not have any internet connection(don’t ask), so all of the machines are set to share with no access restrictions (I know this isn’t the best of ideas, but again, don’t ask).
Anyway, what is it that XP is actually doing dusing these long pauses; is there any way to speed it up?
Not really able to advise you - just to say that we are in a similar situation (although without the lack of internet connection and odd sharing policy), and experience the same sort of delay with XP.
Our network contractors explained it to me as XP “checking/reestablishing all the network connections before it does anything”. They assure us that when we move to a Windows 2000 network and ditch Novell (as we will later this year), these problems will vanish…
Grim
From what I understand, the XP machines check with each machine they connect to to see if there is some kind of “cron job” type thing for them. XP thinks it is the world’s most important system, so it expects other machines to have jobs for it stored up to be executed when the “the most perfect OS” gets around to connecting. This search for jobs is what causes the delay. I can’t think of the english expressions for this stuff right now. I also don’t know how to help. We’ve got just one machine running XP here, and the guy who uses it just ignores the delay and goes on about his business.
The thingamabobby is called “geplante tasks” in german. That translates as “planned tasks.” Maybe Microsoft can tell you how to turn the crap off.
Thanks! I believe that would be ‘scheduled tasks’ in English and a quick google on that expression along with XP and Networking Delay turned up a number of promising results.
I’ll report back when I’ve tried a few things.