Does this speed up network?

I was wanting to validate a couple of network tweaks.
I have a 6 node peer to peer LAN that accesses a database on one machine. All OS are windows xp Pro.
Someone told me that setting IP addresses statically will speed up the network. Is this true?

Also I was told if I added an entry to the lmhosts for the "server" that will also speed up access to the database. Is this true?
Thanks in advance for your input!

 

On such a small network I doubt if either would speed anything. If you want to speed up the database access, increase the RAM of your server.