The local museum was set up with XP Pro on FAT32 drives. Too late to change that (I will get them to do a CONVERT to NTFS as soon as I can straighten out all other problems). They did not spend for even a Pentium2 to act as a server. The entire place is peer-peer. Shared folders have been setup on each PC.
All cable runs are under 50m; in the office I am working all are under 10m. All NICs run at 100Mbps. There are 6 on the 8-port-HUB in the office.
The present problem is on PC2: there are 3 PCs in the science office; I have tried to set up the intels exactly the same, but I MUST be missing something. I have tried a different port on the hub, and a new NIC in PC2. I have added lines in LMHOSTS to try to shorten the search between the two PCs in the office, but neither seems to care.
PC1 is an intel and can quickly [3-7 sec] see other PCs in the museum across the local HUB (not switch) when he clicks on Network Places
PC2 is an intel and every time he clicks on Network Places it takes over 2 min to list the others. You can watch the icon at the bottom & see it waiting, broadcasting, waiting, etc.
PC3 is an apple and can quickly see all shared PCs without problems. I have not attempted to alter this PC.
Other PCs have been checked that are attached to the hub, and they can update in seconds also (I have not seen every PC in the place) - there are 8 PCs on the network.
DHCP is being handled by a Netgear router. I have added to the router settings an entry for it to be a WINS server, but have not heard from the ISP provider (talking to netgear in India is rough too, & no help so far) about whether they are supposed to do more than DHCP.
It seems that PC2 is being forced to do broadcasts to discover the PCs even if it completed a broadcast minutes earlier.
What am I missing?
