Mystery speed issues - Windows mobile

I've been to visit a an out of town client today. Typically my job doesn't include visiting clients or doing any kind of support but my manager asked me to come along and help troubleshoot an random network slow down issue that was affecting some of the clients big wigs.

So, the problem was reported as being "random slow downs on the top floor in the office." We'd already had some discussions and checked the patching, the users on the top floor were spread accross a variety of switches so it wasn't a bottleneck there.

I started off talking to the users about when they were experiencing the issues and how significant they were. Its often the case that the perception of a problem in the eyes of a user is very different to how a techy might see it. After talking the problems through and seeing one example we realised that not all the users on the top floor were having the same problems and the two users that were having problems all seemed to be provoked when trying to access the drive listings on the machine.

Over the years I've had to troubleshoot these sort of problems a few times and went through the usual troubleshooting steps:

• Check the network provider order (LAN at the top)
• Force NIC to run at 100MB full duplex and set switch to do the same
• Map network drived will full DNS path not netbios name
• Disable Windows Image Acquisition service.

Still no improvements after these steps, I was pretty confused. After a monster googling session and bouncing ideas between me and my boss the clue came when another user mentioned that he was experiencing slowness today but hadn't for the previous week... the only difference was that he'd had his Windows Mobile device plugged in today. Sure as a sure thing, unplugging the other two users Windows devices and the machines flew!!

So, why's this happening? I'm not 100% sure as we had to get back to the office and the Windows mobiles aren't supported by us but if someone else comes across this problem I hope this post might give them the head start they need. If you have any feedback do post it below.

In the grand scheme of things I think this highlights one of the issues with Microsoft being a bit too big. I'm a fan of MS in general as there products are generally robust and flexible. However, why they can't get there Windows dev team talking to there Windows mobile dev team is beyond me. I guess another couple of releases down the line they'll have decided on a standard and stuck to it. Until then though... just plug your Windows mobile in when you want to sync it or do it over the air.

soops