Henry Simpson
hsimpson88 at hotmail.com
Fri Jul 11 12:45:45 CDT 2003
After 2 years of smooth sailing with Access 97 on a Terminal Server, I recently ran into some problems relating to performance and actually locking out users with mysterious lock ups. I had some Word automation problem I mentioned on list a couple weeks ago that resulted in locking out all log ins even after every person logged out and disconnected. The Terminal server could not be connected to by anyone and in fact required a hard reboot. Not even task manager via an system admin was able to shut the server down. It turns out that they had some kind of RDP connection issue that could not be fixed. They recently switched to new NeoWare terminals running WinCE replacing our previous WinCE terminals and users were complaining bitterly about screen updating performance, mouse/screen lag and keyboard/screen lag once the new terminals were installed. The RDP connection issue had some software patches but it was discovered that launching Access in and of itself and doing something as simple as creating a blank database instantly caused the terminal screen updating to enter slow motion mode. As an example, on a fresh login, opening Word or Excel and clicking on the down scroll button for 10 seconds and releasing it, the page would scroll smoothly and quickly and promptly stop scrolling the moment the scroll button was released. Launch Access 97 and open a completely empty database with no user defined objects of any kind and then try scrolling in Word or Excel. The screen scrolls at a fraction of the speed, but what's worse, after 10 seconds holding down on the scroll button, the screen continues scrolling for another 25 seconds and is unresponsive to any input, keyboard or mouse. Exit Access and the screen updating remains just as slow. Speed is not restored until a user logs off and then reconnects. Curiously, the old terminals never had this problem. I enquired about return to the old ThinStar terminals and was informed today that the old terminals were retired and that if their software were upgraded, they too would perform poorly. If that is true, that is the end of Access 97 at these offices. My application was identified as the source of the problem and this was solely my problem and no concern of IS personnel. Screen performance continues to be good on workstations connected as terminal server clients, but there are not few and far between. If we replaced these fancy new NeoWare terminals with used 486 computers running Win95 that cost a fraction of the new terminals cost, performance would be many times better yet it looks like this will not be an option. I now have to determine whether I will be able to deploy a VB application as a replacement and whether the same screen updating performance issue arises upon opening a connection to an Access table. Next week all I can do is test some DAO code in Excel. Could Microsoft have reconfigured CE, a pretty standard thin client OS, such that Access 97 is no longer viable? It's just pathetic that a $100.00 used Win95 box can run circles around these new $800.00 terminals. Hen _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail