This is a great thread, I have printed out several of the posts here so that I can fool with them at home when I plug in our old server for my "lab". I will offer these observations:
We had issues with the system, and the speed would go very slow occasionally. Really terrible. We didn't keep a record of what we during, but if we had we might have uncovered the cause many thousands of dollars sooner!
Our intranet was set up for our DOS based system. As such it had very limited needs. We have added work stations, printers, and other stuff over the past 10 years. As we went live with Amazing charts we began to demand more speed and at certain times of the day it would basically shut down. We would page overhear, "everybody out" and then when we all logged back in it was all better again.
Our solution? An $8,000 server that will really be useful for some of the things we THINK we will be doing. Did it help? I don't think it made any measurable improvement in the seat of pants speed that we notice. But the problem did go away. Because when they went to install the new server one of the techs looked carefully at the cable (DOS remember?) and saw that only two of the 6 wires were attached to the connector! All of the older cables had only two (or maybe three, I don't understand the CAT-5, 6 etc.) wires in use. So we changed all the plugs. Now when I am in a room, and I attempt to have a .tiff file sent to the printer, the whole rest of the office doesn't have to wait!
Thought I would share, make you all smile. It only hurts when we look in the checkbook.
