I am having a problem that has my entire staff stumped and I am hoping someone on the list has solved this sort of problem or has some ideas.

Environment:

- Windows 2000 servers

- mixed 10/100 Mb connections (mostly 100)

- HP3000/959-200

- Dell Latitude D600 laptop with XP

- Minisoft termulator

 

On a small number of PCs we are experiencing:

- occasional "hangs" when the user attempts to browse a drive on their PC.  The drive could

be a networked drive or even their "C" drive

- other applications also are thought to exhibit occasional slowness, but this is much harder to quantify

- sessions on the HP3000 are "dropped".  It acts like the network cable was unplugged.  It only seems 

to "drop" when you leave the session "unattended", but we have no "timeouts" set anywhere.  We do 

use Security/3000 but it is NOT set to timeout.  I set up SOS to run in "autoupdate" mode with a 

300 second (5 minute) time and when within a few cycles it will disconnect.

 

We have checked everything we can think of.  I'll list the ones I can remember, but I'm sure I'll leave

something out of this list.

- Updated virus signatures and scanned PCs using 2 different products (no virus found)

- Updated signatures on SpyBot and AdAware and scanned (no problems found)

- Moved the PC to a different location on the network.  I even went directly to the switch where the

3000 and the servers are connected.  I didn't expect this to solve the problem since another PC in my office

sharing the entire connection didn't have the problem.  It didn't correct the problem

- Defragged the drive

- disconnected from all "networked" drives, still experienced the problem on "C" drive

- Used "Fix-It" to look for problems in the directory of my PC.  It found some, but problem remains after

the "repair".

- Put a sniffer on the LAN to examine traffic patterns.  The engineer says "latency or congestion is NOT 

a problem, you are not taxing the LAN from a traffic standpoint".

- I have discounted Minisoft because it is running on 50+ machines with no problems.

 

I'm out of ideas.  I am starting to suspect a hardware problem, because I am seeing the same problem on a

couple of these machines, but how in the world will I ever get Dell to admit to that?

Any other ideas?

 

Terry Simpkins