The other possibility is that the main computer's hard drive is heavily fragmented. What makes me think that is when you said this "...what always works is if we run the AC utilities on the server." As time goes on, more and more "stuff" (scientific, I know) gets indexed (SQL and Windows Stuff). Since SQL express is limited to 1GB of RAM, it starts getting saved on the hard drive. Hard drives are slow and it will show as time goes on. That's why a lot of people see improvement when they restart their server/run AC utilities. Again, I suggest you do the same on the desktops. Auslogics Disk Defrag is quick defragmenter. Windows Defrag can take some time.
Question about this. On the server, disk defragmentation is a scheduled task weekly. (I guess that's the default setting? I don't remember turning it on.) Should I run it more frequently?
I'm going to try the db ping like you said and probably had more memory also. Thanks so much for your help!
Serene
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