XP HE slow network connections

Hi,

I have a network with 4 95 or 98 boxes and 1 XP HE box. The XP box takes forever and a day to get to anything the first time, when going through the network folder. The other boxes don't seem to have this problem at all.

OTOH I found that by mapping all my network drives on the XP box it also makes the connections very quickly. What gives?

Marty

 

You need to give more network detail for an answer to this one.

- IP, other, a mix of protocols?
- If IP, static or dynamic addressing?

And sorry but I'm not totally sure why you'd be going thru the "network folder" or when you speak of mapping all your network drives on the XP box if you mean mapping a drive letter to every share on every 9X box or something else.

 

On a network with no domain controller, WINXP waits for a response from a validation server which is not present, so nothing happens until the timeout.

SP1 fixes this and other networking probs with networking XP to Win9x boxes.

XPuser

 

Hi,

I do have XP home ed., sp1. Re. Newt's questions the protocols used are mixed and IP addressing is dynamic, assigned by the XP box through ICS -- think I said that right.

The issue as it appears to me:

With just the drives on other boxes being accessed through the network neighborhood > entire network > microsoft windows network > computer X using windows explorer, there is a pause from the time I select any computer X on the left pane of explorer and when it displays the shares for that computer on the right pane. Maybe 30 seconds or thereabouts.

This doesn't happen when from the XP machine I select itself, but does when selecting any of the other networked machines which are either 98 or 95.

This doesn't happen when I map the drives, i.e. assign drive letters. I mean after that I can instantly access those shares through their drive letters. But it's still slow going through the network neighborhood.

Marty

 

Things will go pretty slow if your 9X boxes are trying to act as browse master for your network.

On the XP box, have browsing service ON.

On the 9X boxes, disable it. With them you'll have to go into the NIC settings to do this.

You'll probably also see some LAN browsing improvements if you go to static IP addresses, make a hosts file, and put a copy on each PC. Note that the location on 9X and the location on XP are not the same and the file has to be where the PC expects it. You should probably have either a hosts file or hosts.sam file on each machine now. Just make a master copy with info about all the PC. This may or may not be worth the effort for you depending on how much you really want to use Network Neighborhood which is never gonna be real fast on a peer LAN.

 

This is the problem

What is happening is your XP machine is looking to see if there is any scheduled tasks on the networked machines through network neighborhood, there are two options to fix this.

1. Disable the Task Scheduler in the Services or
2. If you want to keep Task Scheduler on your local machine you can go into the registry, regedit by clicking on Start Menu then Run, and type in regedit

go to this key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
SOFTWARE
Microsoft
Windows
CurrentVersion
Explorer
RemoteComputer
NameSpace

Under NameSpace there are two long subkeys, this one
{2227A280-3AEA-1069-A2DE-08002B30309D}

and the one that starts with a D and if you click on it you'll see a key that says Scheduled Tasks, delete the key that starts with the D. do a reboot and then you'll see a major difference from the XP machine. I believe you can do this to the 98 machines as well.