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It took me a while to find a solution to my network file-sharing slowness problem, but I did find one and I thought I’d post it for future reference.
Our company has IP phones at my location and they were connected up to our office network ports and the computer was daisy-chained off of them. Reconnecting the computer directly to the network port without the phone in-between solves the speed problem. Apparently it is not all phones since other computers work just fine this way and this one used to work fine, but something must have changed in the phone to cause the massive slowdown. I don’t know if the phone has failed in some way or if its settings have changed in some way, but the solution is to simply not daisy-chain the computer.

I agree that IT is probably not doing the job that they should be doing and I can possibly backup the server locally even if it is slower than local to local backup. As to making money, my company is the government, we only spend. However , we really are diverging from my initial question. I’m not trying to determine how I should best store my data, but what happened to my PC server to make it suddenly get slow and what can I do about it. The answer to this question could have other general applications to some other computers if something happens to them.

If the data is business related it should be hosted on your servers, then it will be backed up. If it’s not business related I’m surprised IT haven’t already removed it – there’s nothing worse than someone’s personal music collection hogging server space, not to mention the potential legal issues if the music isn’t legit.

cheers, Paul

First of all it is business related, but what it mostly consists of is photos of research projects which is why it is big. I mentioned that there were several reasons why I didn’t want to put it on a “real” server and you hit one of them directly, but in reverse. I may not be enough of the forgiving type, but in the past data on the servers was lost for many people with no hope of recovery. The IT department might have improved, but I don’t want to test them if I don’t have to. If I put the data on my own computer, then I can and do easily back it up regularly. The IT department does not answer to me, my boss, my boss’s boss, or his boss. It might respond to the fifth level up, but even that is questionable.

As to the bad switch port, that I can change when I get back to work.
I don’t think the hard disk is bad because local file copies are fast.
I am suspicious of the network controller, but I’ll have to get another one to try it out.

Has your company got an IT section? If you have then they would the best people to deal with your problem. At least, this was the case with my last employment – I would just phone the helpdesk and raise a ticket and the techs would (try and) fix the problem.

We do have an IT department, but to be honest file sharing is something they currently tolerate, but may soon block. My alternative is to dump my 105 GB of files on their expensive real server (as opposed to a PC with a large hard disk like I do now) and I fear doing that for a number of reasons although I might soon have to go that route. If it is something that I can fix locally that is preferred but I may eventually involve IT.

If it’s just your computer, then disregard my earlier comments completely, doesn’t apply at all. Something’s afoot in your computer, and I haven’t a clue. I’ll be watching this to learn from you and the others here!

I haven’t been able to test it yet, but one thought that I had is that the network card is somehow messing up. Is slowing down something that a bad network card might do?

This is a business, not a home, environment, correct? I’m wondering if the NetAdmin “redistributed,” “reDelt the cards” network access ’cause of additional folks added to the ‘Net? And, if some are streaming work-related YouTube instructional videos, that could slow it down for everyone. Keep us posted on your success in determining what is happening!

Yes it is a work environment. The characteristic that argues against redistribution is transfers between other computers on the same switch are still fast. I don’t know all of the powers of our network admin, but it seems that if it is purposeful change, only this one computer among many has been targeted.

First of all I must apologize for waiting so long to reply, but I just don’t get around to working on this problem very often.

By fully shutting down my virtual machine a few times I eventually managed to get my integeratioon features to not shutdown when running the virtual machine. However I am still left with the problem that my USB printer is not visible in the virtual machine. If I try to connect it I get the message.

33260-error

Looking in the forum referred to above convinced me to try to remove integration features and then reinstall them, but that did not help. by the way I did try moving the port that the printer was attached to and restarted the virutal machine.

I have enabled the integration features, but as shown by the message above, Windows turns them off.

The toobar trick is pretty good. It takes one more click than the old way, but it works pretty well.

The weather gadget is not quite as good of a solution. The weather information that I’m trying to reference is from my own weather station and I put this information into a web format. I could possibly write an app that would read the information and display it, but with a website I could display the information of a locked-down corporate computer and I can’t run an app there.

First of all let me state that I do believe in good passwords with different ones for different logins. What has always bothered me though is how password crackers work since most systems that I have used lock you out after 3 to 5 wrong tries and you don’t need that secure of a password to be safe for only 5 tries. What am I missing?