Software

We've recently been experiencing a number of desktop performance related issues with users complaining of slow running applications, specifically those accessing network resources, on a seemingly random basis. When our analysts visit the users, the performance often seems ok, but then we'll be told later that for a while, everything slowed down to a crawl. A common complaint is that applications (i.e. Outlook or Excel) will appear to hang for a period of time before suddenly coming back to life.

We have recently upgraded many users PCs to brand new HP dual-core PCs with 2GB RAM, but it seems to have made little difference.

As we are currently relying on the Windows 2000 Task Manager to diagnose PC resource issues, we are obviously a little limited in what we can discover, and often have to rely on the user to tell us when issues occur and what the Task Manager is showing (which isn?t very professional). As such, can anybody recommend a good tool that will allow us to interrogate what is happening on a PC over a period of days/week, that might help us identify where and when resource issues are occurring, or if the problem lies elsewhere? Similarly, can anybody recommend a tool that we can install on a PC that will log and report on network performance over a period of time, as we suspect that there may be latency issues but are having problems proving it.

Regards,
Ben