To those who have shifted to servers, is it worth the expense to change to a server? Does it speed up the access considerably? Or is the slow-ness of the program inherent to the program itself?
Leila, Sorry, but I am biased. It is always worth the money to get a server with server software if you can afford it. If you can't, then it isn't. Most of the speed will be with the program and how the Access database is designed to transfer data across your network. You probably wouldn't notice a huge difference in speed with a server given your save setup, but if you ran it in a domain environment, your overall advantages would be extremely good.
XP (pro for the main, home for the rest)
Please don't take offense to this statement. I heard it from one of my tech gurus who taught me networking, but I think it just hammers home the concept. "What is it about the word 'home' that people in businesses don't understand?" XP Home is for home. It's main issue is networking. You can't even network XP Home on a true server domain environment. When you get a chance, upgrade to Pro. But, I wouldn't run out and buy seven XP Pro CDs.
Daily, I run Amazing Utilities, anti-spyware, Auslogics disk defrag before the first patient.
Again, just my opinion, but I wouldn't do any of those things everyday. The only thing I would recommend running daily would be a good backup program and a good antivirus scan at night. Defragging is overrated and, at most, you would need to do it monthly. If you are using your "main computer" only for AC, then it isn't going to get very fragmented and once you open AC, it is in RAM. A good virus scanner should cover spyware as well. Amazing Utilities maybe weekly at most. A good exercise would be to check the properties of the AmazingCharts.mdb database before and after Amazing Utilities. If you are going from 25.2MBs to 25.1MBs, then you aren't getting much out of it.
You have plenty of RAM, and I doubt it is a processor issue. Here is where I would check as it hasn't been stated yet:
What speed are your cables? If they are Cat5e, they will be pretty fast, but if you can upgrade to Cat6, it will get much faster. Of course, everything would have to be Cat6 then including your NIC cards. Now, Cat5e should be capable of 100 Mbs, but if your NIC cards aren't capable of 100 Mbs, then your performance will drop off dramatically. Go into your NIC card's properties in the device management and make sure your Duplex is set to auto detect or auto negotiate and look at its speed. Make sure your NIC card on the main computer is rated for 100 Mbs if Cat5e or 1000 Mbs if Cat6.
Please make sure you are using a switch and not a hub to connect your network. A switch will be X times faster than a hub where X = your number of work stations. Also check the speed of the switch. Again, it needs to be 100 Mbs for Cat5e and 1000 Mbs for Cat6.
Again, depending on your wiring and how easy it would be to rewire, you will notice a considerable speed difference if you upgrade to Cat6 but, AGAIN, everything has to be Cat6 speed.
Is anyone else using the main computer? You may not need a true server, but if someone else is using the "main computer" and using programs which are resource intensive, that could slow you down.
Finally, just to give yourself a yardstick, connect to the database on a local computer and run AC just to see how fast it is from its own computer. You will never get any faster than that over a network.
hth
