At a hotel I support I was called in to figure out why the reception workstation had slowed to a crawl.
In this environment we are running four windows XP Pro Dell Optiplex machines about three years old. The workstations are running MS office and one of them functions as the server for a reservation package called Guest tracker. The workstation that functions as a server is also running Carbonite for off site backups.
Initially I ran through all of the AV, Spyware, Power saving, and defrag type of options with no results. Checkdisk resulted in either a 2+ hour scan time or a crash & reboot so the hard drives were replaced. The backup OS image was then written to the HDs with Acronis.
The systems still ran very slow so I changed Carbonite to only run during off hours. Carbonite was the choice of, and was set up by, the hotel owner. I then contacted the developer of Guest Tracker and went through all of his suggestions.
Then after a number of other hardware adjustments I changed out the hub and router.
I then moved the data file off the workstation/server and over to one of my personal computers with a 1 Gig NIC to match up with the new 1 Gig hub. This was faster, but still not good enough.
The owner of the hotel then came back and had me replace everything back to “the way it was” He has now firmly latched on to the Magic DLL theory. That is the theory that one or two DLL files have gone bad and I need to replace just those files.
My next step was going to be bringing in a new client machine with a fresh XP install and running that from my spare server.
While I am fully aware of the fact that I now have two problems I am now looking for a Magic DLL. So any suggestions on troubleshooting this would be appreciated.