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Running DOS Program on Windows 2000

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5 replies

by afford2

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I have a database program called storetrak we have been using for many years. It contains 10's of thousands of entries in the database. This program runs great in the machine it is in but runs awfully slow when being accesed by one of its peer machines. Is there anyway to spped up the search feature? We have been searching for the last year for a company who has a program to work just like ours does now only in a windows version. FOr now however, I would just like to speed up the searches. All the machine have 256 ram and above 300 htz processors. All machine have windows 2000 installed.

Please help
Ann

5 replies

by bill_w

Couple of questions first:
1. I assume that the d/b is loaded on one specific win2000 pc, and there is a shared drive on it that the other peer pcs are accessing.

2. As it is a dos pgm I am also assuming that the software is being run on each of the client/peer pcs, and accessing the d/b on the host's shared drive/folder via your LAN.

3. Are the peers needing read/write access to the db, or just read only? If just read only a kludge would be to have read-only copies of the d/b on all peer pcs, and update them by cron/winat/whatever on a regular basis from the master. It is a kludge, but it would be fast.

4. Another option, if they want read/write access, may be to use a remote-control program like VNC, and the peers would beas if they were actually on the host/master. That may only work for one user at a time though.

5. Of course, the purists out there would probably suggest converting the app to (say) MS Access, or even an excel spreadsheet, but I doubt that it would perform too well. A better option would be conversion to a good windows-based RDMS (preferably free)that is truly multi-user, but that I leave for others to suggest.

Comments?

Bill

by mark

NT does a terrible job running DOS programs. You would have better luck with a Novell server or moving it to a WIN9X system. You could though, try right clicking My Computer, goto performance, and optimize performance for background or network tasks. You also might ask the software vendor. If they are using a betrieve engine or something, sometimes a module can be loaded on the server to handle network requests faster.

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