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Date:         Sat, 22 May 1999 07:47:10 EDT
Reply-To:     DPriemer@AOL.COM
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         David Priemer <DPriemer@AOL.COM>
Subject:      Re: Gerry is ill - suggestions for a server upgrade
Comments: To: sullivan@openmarket.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

I do not claim to be an expert in any field but I do like my job as a PC Tech. (better than any other job that I have had) and have been doing it since the TRS-80's and 8088's (back in 1985-86) along with some progaming (some progams are still in business use today).

We have been able to solve many problems with NT by applying the service paks from Microsoft and in some cases cause more or new problems with the same.

In playing with NT5 we have found it to be buggy and therefore have not applied the upgrades to our customers systems yet. We have however been successfull in fixing many of Nt's querks by applieng the different service paks that are available for NT4. As you probably know, NT3 is not and will not be Y2k compliant. Many of our customers want to go from NT3 to NT5 but at this point we are advising against it as there are no official service paks available for the version.

As far as hardware goes, I agree at keeping cost down and in most cases (in my experience anyway) when being advised to replace the entire hardware system you are talking with someone who is or was a sales person after a comission or bonus of some sort and they are still running in that sales person mode (just because it costs more does not mean that it is better).

My personal opinion is to assess the customers neeeds/goals and determine if the hardware/software is suffecient to perform the task to meet those needs and goals.

In many cases a memory upgrade and hard drive upgrade (ecspecaily when replacing an old hard drive with a slow access rate) and operating system tweaking as all that is needed (usualy less than a 1/4th of the cost of a complete hardware replacement along with data transfer from old to new pc). I have had many customers call me a couple of days after getting their PC's back all happy and excited about the gained speed and reliability of their computer (this is my greatest award).

So, for the record, my opinion is: "Gerry", who has realy been doing pretty good with all things considerd, would benefit from a RAM and HDD upgrade along with some OS tweaking. If "Gerrys" current HDD access rate is greater than 14ms then I would recommend replacing it with a faster drive. If the partition is still FAT16 and the OS is NT4 then I would go to FAT32 (some programs will not run in FAT32 so this has to be checked as well).

In a message dated 05/21/1999 7:46:11 AM Eastern Daylight Time, sullivan@OPENMARKET.COM writes:

<< The reason NT Server runs out of virtual memory is that IIS and other services have known memory leaks -- no amount of memory upgrades will eliminate these kind of crashes -- only delay them. I believe IIS4 is better than IIS3, but much of it depends upon careful "tweaking" of the system and not just adding more/better hardware. One way to "tweak" is to eliminate/reduce any unnessary services (such as FTP, gopher, etc.).

I agree with a second drive. However, I'm always skeptical when some "expert" (and every company is full of them) recommends a complete new system to solve a problem. And please don't explain to me his credentials -- I'm sure they are extraordinary. It just that if you ask ten "experts" you'll get ten different answers.

And clearly one of the (many) solutions is simply to add another hard disk, tweak the sytem to eliminate the memory leaks, and keep the costs down.

Cheers,

MJS >>


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