Strange behaviour of Exchange Server and speed

If you have seen my other post under “Hardware” you will know that my laptop died on me a week or two ago and so far I have not replaced it. This has given rise to two problems.

I EMAIL

Our set up consists of a server running Small Business Server and Exchange Server for email. At the moment there are only three laptops (XP professional) in regular use on the network – well two now that mine had died.

I need fairly constant connection to email so I logged onto my account on both of the other computers. On one I can see all of my emails, but on the other only a few of the most recent. I know I am looking at the same folders because if I make a change on one of the computers it is reflected on the other. But why will one computer not see all of the emails in the inbox and sent items folders? There are over 1000 emails in each of these folders.


2 SPEED

When my computer died I removed one of the hard disks – there are two on a mirrored RAID so both I believe are identical. I placed this disk in a portable case and connected by USB so that I could access my files. As far as I can remember I have done nothing other than that - and the above noted work on my email account.

The problem is that I now have both of the laptops suffering from seriously slow performance – for instance I am typing this into a Word document (for later pasting into the thread) and the screen cannot keep up with my typing and I’m not a fast typist. Periodically though it will run normally for a while then slow up again. It’s as though the computer in undertaking some mysterious operation that is invisible to me (I have interrogated Task Manager) and suspends operation of the application in use for short bursts. The severity of this problem appears to vary over time.

This also appears to cause applications to become unresponsive, but if I wait long enough the application regains consciousness.

As you might imagine this is causing myself and my partner untold misery and seriously affecting our ability to do business.

Any help will be gratefully acknowledged.

 

I may have posted part of the problem too quickly.

I have now checked again and the computer that was showing a few of the emails appears to be slowly finding all of them. So that problem appears to be resolving itself. Perhaps it's something to do with the speed problem

It’s late here, so I will check again tomorrow and report.

I will also do a boot time scan when I restart the computers in the morning.

 

I'm slightly familiar with RAID but not with how it's configured. I know breaking some RAID configurations makes a mess so I'm glad you were able to get one of your drives out and functioning.

I you take the RAID turned external drive off does it solve the slow email recognition issue? Is it possible that the RAID drive is looking for it's mate to mirror with at intervals? Even worse, could it be trying to mirror your existing c: drive? Removing the external and seeing if it resolves, then backing up all of the RAID drive data to another drive might eliminate some headaches.

Good luck bringing the 3rd system back!

 

Hello Handygal and thanks for your interest.

The raid software and drivers are all on the computer that died. The two disks that I removed are absolutely identical and will not be put back into any computer using a RAID unless they are reformatted. I removed drives several years ago when upgrading to larger capacity disks. As on this occasion I used one of the disks in a portable caddy but on that occasion there were no problems – but then the disks were of smaller capacity and the caddy originally had an even smaller drive – could that be significant

I am confident therefore that the RAID has no influence. The single disk I can access to retrieve my work when I get the new computer with new larger disks, the second disk will be stored as a full backup. Both disks are perhaps 3 years old so I would have changed them soon in any case. The new computer will have the operating system and RAID disks installed when it arrives so all I have to do is spend an age loading all my software then transferring data from the old disk. In fact the new machine has the capability to hold three disks so I will probably just slip the old disk into the third slot and not bother with the caddy.

The slowing down of the two computers did start at about the same time as I connected the old disk by USB to them but I could not be sure that that caused the problem as I also started messing about logging into the network as myself on the other computers – so either of these two actions could have started the problem. The slowness does not improve when the disk is not connected. I only unplugged the disk after shutting down the laptop.

I have performed several scans with two or three different utilities for malware and virus on both computers today and did not find anything of consequence.

 

Well apart from Handygal there was not much in the way of support for this thread but I have solved the problems and thought it worth while reporting back in the hope that someone might be helped in future.

Email.
By juggling the pst files and copying emails between them I was eventually able to get all my emails into the right place. I suspect the problem started because I was logged onto the server from two computers at the same time. Exactly what I did to resolve this issue I cannot relate as it was quite involved and convoluted.

Speed.
I think a comment in my last post gave a clue to part of the problem. I don’t think the caddy was capable of running a 150gb disk. Initially it only had a 20gb disk. Some time ago I replaced that with an 80gb disk and that worked OK but after several tests where copying from the caddy resulted in errors I concluded that the disk was too big for the caddy.

The computer was not as slow when I reconnected the caddy and then closed it down carefully. But it still kept stuttering every 10 seconds or so for about 3 seconds.

I removed all of my firewalls and virus checking software and lo and behold the stuttering stopped. I have now done a clean install of updated security and all is well. The new scans found nothing amiss except the registry was a bit of a mess even though I had been running RegCure fairly regularly.

Hope this help someone even though I could not point to an exact cause of the problems.