wintotal still slow and locking up daily

[MTGIACC]

AV and WinTotal

Hi CRae1,
It sounds like your Endpoint may be part of the issue. I am running the same version of WinTotal as you are. I would not recommend completely removing Endpoint just yet. If you have not done so already, on your server you need to exclude your shared folder for WinTotal from being scanned by Endpoint (or any other AV product for that matter). You also need to make an exclusion for the folder running the WinTotal instance of SQL Server. On the workstations make exclusions for the WinTotal mapped drive and the local folder for WinTotal. As far as AV software I have been running NOD32 by Eset for many years and it has worked great. AVG Free is a good product for the price however I have seen some malware get around it. Some of the fake AV and HD Defrag malware seens to Give AVG Free a hard time. To be fair I have seen these pieces of malware get around up to date, paid for version of Symantec and McAfee products as well. Hope this helps.

 

[CRae1]

Hi MTGIACC -
Thank you again for your continued help!

I did already remove Endpoint from the server and reinstalled the clients as unmanaged clients. With the exception of one workstation, which I installed a trial of Sophos.

(We did already have endpoint setup with all the recommended folder exceptions and also trusted sites exceptions)

After removing endpoint from the server and also completely from one workstation, we did noticed that it made a great difference in speed on the workstations. The workstation running Sophos is running actually faster (read/write access) than the ones running endpoint (same workstation specs).
However, on the server the disk read/write speed was still very slow.... particularly the write speed. We have a SCSI drive on the server. So, we just added a 2nd harddrive (IDE drive) and moved Wintotal to it. We are currently testing to see if that makes a difference. We believe it has. Just in doing the standard read/write test on the new harddrive, it is significantly (several times) faster than the old SCSI. Yesterday was our first real test day for Wintotal with no "hangs" or lockups...."yet".

I will post back after we have used it for several days and let u know. I would have to say that the Wintotal Tech guy that has been assigned to helping us, has been knowledgeable and very helpful.

 

[CRae1]

Update on our Wintotal/server issues:
Our server harddrive is reading and writing at a very slow speed (especially writing) -- using CrystalDiskMark (free utility) to test it.
We hired a tech to come in and desk the disk and he said it's just because it's an older SATA Drive/Raid configuration (speed is 7200). We were going to replace the Raid harddrives for 15,000 SATA drives, but later learned (per the tech company guy) that our server cannot handle any upgrades to faster harddrives.

So, it seems we will need to buy a new server ($7,000 +/-)?

Does anyone have another solution or ideas besides replacing our server?

We only run wintotal and MS exchange (only for calendar), and outlook on it..... it just seems like we shouldn't need to replace it.

I ran a chkdsk -- no errors on the harddrive...appears to running as it should. But why the slow write speeds?

We removed symantec on the server -- so there should be no bottlenecks. The temporary IDE harddrive we connected (it's a 7200) runs twice as fast as the RAID SATA drives (also, 7200).

 

[incognito]

Just for fun, have you tried updating your motherboard BIOS and RAID drivers? Have you installed the Intel matrix storage console? It can report some issues. Have you tried disconnecting one raid drive and testing speed, than the other, individually? (be careful!!!) Is the RAID on the MoBo? You could get a new RAID card ($50), disable the MoBo RAID, and then you could install 2 new 15K SATA drives (2 450 gig Seagate's should only set you back under $800). When you open task manager, is there anything running in the background? Have you set your pagefile.sys to a large enough number?

Hope that helps!

 

[CRae1]

I will try your suggestion with regard to testing the individual drives.
We have a separate RAID card -- it doesn't support a 15k drive. I talked to HP and they don't make a controller card for our system to support a faster drive. I'm sure there are some off-brand cards out there (like I'm guessing the seagate you suggested)... just a little hesitant about compatibility issues, but it's worth checking into. I'll check again to see about background processes. thanks for taking the time to post! I'll keep you updated.

 

[William Little]

slowdown

I had similar problems. Nathan, from a la mode, got the situation fixed. He directed the database to the ip address and port instead of having it route through a name look-up. The increase in speed was fantastic and it's nice not to see the safe start screen.

 

[Gregory Beck]

Norton and Symantic

I found that symantec and norton were causing all sorts of problems last year. A buddy is a pretty experienced geek and said all they use is AVG (free version). I have found that it is good on the av side and does not interfere with aurora. No problems in a year on that score. (cnet downloads for free AVG)

Get rid of Norton Symantic I had notning but problems when I had that.
I use windows7 with microsoft security and have no problems.

 

[Ron Patton]

Reading all these nightmarish tech situations reaffirms my 2 decisions over the past decade where I switched to Alamode from 2 different software products--and abandoned them after the 90-day test period. With 20 years in this business, I have had to become tech savy, but the Alamode experience was just too painful. I am not going to turn this into a cheap shot promotion for an alternate software product, but I have found levels of stability that appear to be in a totally different universe. Have always been intrigued by the "bells and whistles" of the Alamode products, but just too dang old to fight these type battles. Hope you get these problems behind you. RPatton, Chattanooga, TN

 

[Couch Potato]

Clearly the primary problem in this cases was the dreaded Norton virus, not WinTOTAL. Personally, I would rather use a typewriter than Athena or Aurora versions of WinTOTAL, but I think TOTAL 2011 is easily the best program available. Like most things in life personal tastes make all the difference in satisfaction with any product.

 

[incognito]

I am not going to turn this into a cheap shot promotion for an alternate software product, but I have found levels of stability that appear to be in a totally different universe

So, Ron, what product is it that you feel will be superior. I'm no AlAMode supporter, but it does seem to be the best package I can find. It is pretty complicated software, subject to difficulties. Where do you think the pastures will be greener?