A Colleague's Comments:


A Few Suggestions

Before you spend any money perhaps you can try a few simple and free things. You mention two very different problems - slow Internet & sluggish applications on the local machine. Are you sure the Internet is slow? Are the applications sluggish?

 

Before you spend a lot of time measuring the bandwidth you should ask your ISP to give you a printout of your usage. If your T-1 (or whatever) is less than 70% utilized, then there is probably no Internet bandwidth problem. If it is maximized, they can tell you what is maxing it out. Your problem may be as simple as your staff listening to Internet radio all over the district. Let your ISP do all this work for you. Most ISPs have at least one router geek who can capture all sorts of information, even if they do not have the fancy tools others do.

 

The other thing to remember is that most LAN traffic is fine. The Internet with a T-1 is 1.54 MBps and the slowest LAN I have seen lately is 100 MBps. So sluggish Internet is almost never the local network. However, you can also check this without fancy tools.

 

Wait till everyone goes home. Find your main closet where the Internet router is and bring your digital camera with. Take good pictures of everything and make sure they turn out. See what switch the router plugs into. Are all the lights on the switch going like crazy? If no one is there and most of the computers are off, then there should only be minimal flashing. If the thing is going crazy, then you have a problem and it could be as simple as a bad network card on the network. If this is the case, call me and I can help you walk through a free way to find the problem.

 

If there is minimal flashing, then your servers and main backbone are fine. If it goes crazy during the day then you can be pretty sure it is something attached to the network. If that is the case let me know and I can explain how to find the nasty device or virus infected computer without spending a ton of money.

 

In any case, after these two things you will have eliminated your LAN and your Internet as problems. Now to part two, the sluggish computers.

 

One of the problems with anti-spyware software and anti-virus software is that it can really slow computers down. Another problem is that it can have serious problems with regular software on weird and unpredictable occasions. If this conflict is on some of your images, then all or most of your machines will be slow. 

 

Take one machine and go off-line, no network hookup, and install your OS from CDs - no updates from the Internet and make sure you completely wiped out the computer hard drive first. Test It. Add the Office program you use from CDs. Test It. Add your e-mail program. Test It. Do this for all of the software you have CDs for. Do not hook up on the network. If the machine is still fast after this, then add your Anti-virus program. Test It. Now hook up to the network and image the machine. (This way you have a base point to come back to.) Now start adding the rest of your applications one at a time. Do not put an anti-spyware program on the computer and do not surf the web. At each stage, if the machine is still fast, create another image. You will more than likely find the culprit in due course.

 

The Corbey computers we have here are a good example. At one point in the Windows update they would crash. It turns out the the Intel network card in the computer was a clone. Windows saw it as a real Intel card and downloaded an update for it. When the update installed the network was no longer available on the machine, although the lights blinked and the device manager showed a good install. Doing one piece at a time found the problem.

 

If you have an updated anti-virus program, it should be able to handle your anti-spyware duties on a clean machine. If you do not have the version of Symantec or Trend or whatever that integrates the anti-virus and anti-spyware, you may wish to consider that as it presents less of a chance to conflict.

 

It is critical to remember that all the fancy filters and anti-everything appliances people use to manage network hazards usually do nothing to help you find that computer with a bad network card. These things usually do not help with software conflicts, nor do they solve the problem of bad network cabling. Some will find the woman watching her grandson by live video feed across the country and some will find users with the Internet radio turned on. But your ISP should be able to help you out with that for free.

 

Most of us have the ESCs for ISPs and you may have to be very nice to get someone to take the time and analyze your usage. Remember, they are over-worked and under-paid also. Still, all of the ones I have dealt with were able to give me the information.

 

Good luck.

 

Dirk D Dykstra