Lee,
Glad it worked. You said you are using Vista and XP. Is this XP Pro? And what version of Vista are you using? I believe you said you are usng the XP computer to host the databases and running Vista as the client connecting to it. Is that correct? In your test scenario where XP is being used as your "pseudoserver," are you running any other programs?
Also, no matter what you do, wireless (at this point in time) will always be slower than wired (depending on your speed of the wired). If you are running Cat5, you will be getting 100MB speed if everything else is set up correctly, and Cat6 will give you 1000MB or 1GB although you actually end up getting ~ 400MB speed (again depending on your setup, i.e if your switch is 100MB, then you will only get 100MB).
You can experiment easily with a two computer setup. Go to Best Buy or Circuit City or Staples and pick up a CROSSOVER cable not a plain Ethernet cable or patch cable. With a crossover cable you can connect directly from NIC card to NIC card. If you use a non-crossover cable you would need a switch or hub. You can then test speeds by making a large test file that is 1GB in size. Then transfer it from one computer to the other using wired and wireless.
The other problem with wireless is you will lose your connection to the database intermittently even if only for a second or so, but just long enough to jeopardize your note possibly. You shouldn't, but it happens. But, you will still get popup messages.
To answer your question about using a server such as SBS, you won't find yourself getting that much more speed. There will be less bottlenecking and better throughput, but you probably won't notice that. The best part of the server is one, you can put your money into a super fast processor and 4GB of RAM if it is a 32 bit OS. You can go up to 32GB of RAM or so with a 64 bit OS, but that is a whole different creature. Plus the RAID configs will give you faster read/writes depending on which RAID you choose. Of course, you get much better redundancy.
Finally, on your clients if you really want speed after you have set up Cat6 cables, switches and NIC cards, you can install the new WD VelociRaptors. Those things smoke. I get almost three times faster transfer speed along wtih other improvements. But, it is $300 plus for a 300GB drive. Well worth the money if you are looking for more speed. I must confess I only have one on my own computer and not in the rooms. I am thinking of adding two more.
