I have recently moved a business from a Novell server to a Dell Windows 2000 server. But my main concern is the computers in the HR department.
The two women in HR have been moved to a new office across the hallway which meant bringing the LAN cable from one side of the hall. Keep this in mind, here are the problems.
1. one of the ladies in the HR department will be logged on Citrix and it will often freeze her machine, she’s running windows ME and never had this problem across the hall…nobody else has this problem.
2. the other lady in HR handles the payroll and downloading the time clocks, 1 from a modem, and two through the network on IP addresses. When we switched to the new server it still worked perfectly. But we just gavethis lady a new computer, same network card (but tried several), same operating system (win98), but time clock 3 will not download 1 out of 9 times. If you try to update and collect (we use Kronos) it might do it, but if it doesn’t, all you have to do is try again and it works. It’s completely random. I’ve pinged the clock for hours to see if it loses packets and I’ve only lost 1 packet in 8 hours of pinging. SO…
My theory is that when the cables were moved across the hall, they were bent too many times (the wire in our cabling is very brittle) and maybe there’s a bit of noise in the line…but if this is the case, why would the clocks have downloaded, in the new location, with a different computer? Does this sound like a line noise problem to you? We even had a situation where all of our payroll and timeclock files became corrupt while those ladies were using them, and yet nobody else in the building has any problems. I don’t think it’s Windows 2000 Server related, but maybe youknow something I don’t, maybe you know of a test I can perform that I haven’t, but I’ve tried every saturation-type test I can find and so far nothing has given me answers…thanks