YeOldeStonecat
Well-Known Member
- Reaction score
- 6,341
- Location
- SE Connecticut and SW Florida
Holy cow what a pain this one was....
Client that is relatively far away...a gold club on an island. She has been complaining about files opening up painfully slowly...kept saying something wrong with the server, something wrong with the workstations. And complained that workstations often hung during bootup and shutdown.
Every time I remote into the server...seems responsive enough.
Pair of Dell Optiplex 780 workstations..C2D, 4 gigs RAM, XPp. Server is a Dell PE T310 I think, Xeon quad core, 16 gigs of RAM, pair of 10k SAS RAID 1 OS, three 10k SAS RAID 5 data, SBS2008.
1x other desktop in golf pro shop but he doesn't do much but surf and catch malware.
Another couple of computers across the island at the day camp that do Outlook Anywhere from this SBS box.
So I go out earlier this week....pair of brand new HDs to clone over on the workstations just for good measure. Do a little tweaking with them, BIOS flashes, chipset driver updates, yank out the Embassy Wave stuff that seemed to hang shutdown (tdmsomething process), remove Windows Desktop Search which causes hangs after login. Clone/replace the drives...workstations are now running like champs...like a C2D 4 gig WinXP box should run.
Do BIOS update and other drivers updates on the server...C drive was getting cramped so I moved WSUS from C to F drive....basically server was running OK but I threw a bit at it, seemed to run a hair better.
Update NOD to V5 on the workstations and 4.5 on the server.
Now..she shows me the Office issue. Double tap a document or spreadsheet on the servers shared/common drive...and Word or Excel take a bit to open..and often take forever to populate. Sometimes a couple of minutes. However...open up Word or Excel first...file...open..browse to the file...pops right open.
Check for add-ons...really only had Avery label in there...no difference.
Do some Google-Fu...stumble upon "DDE". Basically in the Windows file association for those files, to run a virus scan on the file before opening. Do some more checking, seems a more radical issue with people that had Eset v4, and Office 2007, and files on Server 08. Some tried disabling SMB2...I tried that..although it shouldn't matter with XP clients, server should kick down to SMB1 for XP.
So I find where to disable DDE in Excel...and it works! Double tap a file on the server and it pops right open.
(Open Microsoft Excel 2007.
Click on the Office 2007 button (top left)
Click on "Excel Options" near the bottom right.
In the left navigation area, select "Advanced"
On the right side scroll all the way down to "General’
In the General group there is an option, "Ignore other applications that use Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE)"
Select this option
Click on OK
Close Excel 2007)
However, there is no way (that I can find) to go into Word and disable DDE.
There is also a way to disable it within Windows, in the file association area...
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r20488388-XP-Home-Word-and-Excel-slow-to-open-document
But I can't get it to stick with Word..every time I go back and check it DDE is checked again.
Anyone stumble across any 3rd party utilities to disable this?
Client that is relatively far away...a gold club on an island. She has been complaining about files opening up painfully slowly...kept saying something wrong with the server, something wrong with the workstations. And complained that workstations often hung during bootup and shutdown.
Every time I remote into the server...seems responsive enough.
Pair of Dell Optiplex 780 workstations..C2D, 4 gigs RAM, XPp. Server is a Dell PE T310 I think, Xeon quad core, 16 gigs of RAM, pair of 10k SAS RAID 1 OS, three 10k SAS RAID 5 data, SBS2008.
1x other desktop in golf pro shop but he doesn't do much but surf and catch malware.
Another couple of computers across the island at the day camp that do Outlook Anywhere from this SBS box.
So I go out earlier this week....pair of brand new HDs to clone over on the workstations just for good measure. Do a little tweaking with them, BIOS flashes, chipset driver updates, yank out the Embassy Wave stuff that seemed to hang shutdown (tdmsomething process), remove Windows Desktop Search which causes hangs after login. Clone/replace the drives...workstations are now running like champs...like a C2D 4 gig WinXP box should run.
Do BIOS update and other drivers updates on the server...C drive was getting cramped so I moved WSUS from C to F drive....basically server was running OK but I threw a bit at it, seemed to run a hair better.
Update NOD to V5 on the workstations and 4.5 on the server.
Now..she shows me the Office issue. Double tap a document or spreadsheet on the servers shared/common drive...and Word or Excel take a bit to open..and often take forever to populate. Sometimes a couple of minutes. However...open up Word or Excel first...file...open..browse to the file...pops right open.
Check for add-ons...really only had Avery label in there...no difference.
Do some Google-Fu...stumble upon "DDE". Basically in the Windows file association for those files, to run a virus scan on the file before opening. Do some more checking, seems a more radical issue with people that had Eset v4, and Office 2007, and files on Server 08. Some tried disabling SMB2...I tried that..although it shouldn't matter with XP clients, server should kick down to SMB1 for XP.
So I find where to disable DDE in Excel...and it works! Double tap a file on the server and it pops right open.
(Open Microsoft Excel 2007.
Click on the Office 2007 button (top left)
Click on "Excel Options" near the bottom right.
In the left navigation area, select "Advanced"
On the right side scroll all the way down to "General’
In the General group there is an option, "Ignore other applications that use Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE)"
Select this option
Click on OK
Close Excel 2007)
However, there is no way (that I can find) to go into Word and disable DDE.
There is also a way to disable it within Windows, in the file association area...
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r20488388-XP-Home-Word-and-Excel-slow-to-open-document
But I can't get it to stick with Word..every time I go back and check it DDE is checked again.
Anyone stumble across any 3rd party utilities to disable this?
