what is causing our pcs to go slow.

[goodhead]

We had a server crash a few months ago which turned the network upsideown.

The network has not been the same since.

 

We have dell optiplex 260 and 270 ultra small form factor pcs.

Since the crash they have been realy slow. Users click the start menu and it doesn't always respond. Also logging off can take a while to respond as well.

 

They are old machines, but i don't think its that.

 

My line manager is asking for machines to be rebuilt to solve it. Thats just man power i just don't have.

 

Is there somethink hogging resources? What could it be?

Our switches are all working ok.

 

Dan

[Jon]

Do you use redirected start menus?

 

I would take a look at ALL your DNS settings and make certain they are correct.

[SYNACK]

How did you end up recovering your servers in the end, if they have changed names then there could be some stuff still trying to refference the old servers. If it was a total crash of the servers did you recover the domain and clean all of the old entries in DNS and AD from the failed servers out?

Delete Failed DCs from Active Directory

 

Also are all of the Active Directory FSMO roles assigned to active servers or seized from broken ones.

 

I would also check all logon scripts and icons to make sure that they do not reference a server that is no longer present or named the same thing.

[srochford]

One of the things we've found which slows down start menus is when you have a link to a server based item and that no longer exists (even if it does exist, it can make things slow!)

 

Use filemon (sysinternals bit of MS web site) and watch what happens when you click start - filter it on explorer.exe - you may see it trying to read lots of files and failing.

 

If you create a new user and let it use a local profile is that OK? if so, it's definitely a problem with the profile and, as others have said, references to things which are no longer there cause problems (does anyone remember the Rowan Atkinson sketch about the blind man looking for a black cat in a dark room that isn't there - that's kind of what's going on and it makes life difficult for explorer :-))

 

Check also with wireshark on a machine and see if you can see any "odd" traffic (things like "who has IP address" requests for IPs which don't exist are often clues - we once saw a massive flood where something was basically scanning our entire address range. Turned out it was some crap software running on a Mac that was doing it but it was really causing problems!!)

[BootManager]

If it was your primary domain controller went down then make sure that no secondary domain controller has been delegated (and kept) the 'primary' role by default. I was working in a school some years back when a similar thing happened, we were upgrading our main servers over the summer but after boot up we experienced the whole network grinding to a halt. Eventually we found that a 'forgotten' old server running NT4 sitting in a backroom had taken over the primary role and all network traffic was being routed to there.

 

Try isolating your server with a switch and a couple of client machines and see how it performs with that set up.

[FN-GM]

Make sure you have a global catalogue server. You can do this by:

Active Directory Sites and Services >

Site Name >

Servers >

Server name>

Right click NTDS settings then properties

Make sure you have at least one global catalogue server