First, let me start by saying that I'm one of those half-way technical people. I'm definitely not an administrator overlord. With that said, a friend of mine who owns a small retail shop was oversold on a computer solution for her business. The company talked her into a server running SBS 2011 Essentials. Seriously overkill for her organization. The problem is that it seems to be running slowly. She has had problems with it since it was installed. The company never delivered a working solution to her and then continued to bill her for hourly support whenever she had issues. I'm trying to help her get this figured out since she has dropped so much money into it so far. Is there anything I can do to see what might be going on? Maybe some sort of performance report?
The system is a Dell server with a Pentium P1403 2.6GHz processor (not sure what the P1403 is). It has three 500GB 7200 RPM hard drives because it is supposed to have RAID enabled. As for memory, it has 4x4GB 1333 chips, total of 16GB. They sold her a backup solution called RD1000. It's basically ejectable hard drives encased in nice plastic cases. I've noticed that there is a program called Folder Clone running which seems to be doing something to the D drive as well as the E which is the RD1000. I don't think it is what's doing the backup, though, because the backup folders on the RD1000 drives are labeled Veritas. The other problem she's experiencing is that she cannot get the backup drives to eject once they are inserted. About two weeks ago, she couldn't get them to stay in the slot. The server's purpose is to house the data files for Quickbooks 2013 and Quickbooks Point of Sale 2013. There is one workstation that is used as the POS. Other than that, the server holds a few documents.
I apologize if this is too much information for a post. I'm not super familiar with using forums. I just wanted to make sure I threw as much info about the server out there as possible. I guess I should add that the slowness is noticed at times on the workstation when it's accessing the Quickbooks data. If you go to the server to do anything, the hard drives appear to be going nonstop and it is sluggish to respond to opening programs. Ultimately, if we can't get this figured out, we are thinking of just converting it to a Windows 7 workstation so it can be used as an additional POS should the need arise.
Thanks tremendously for your time. If I need to change anything or post this elsewhere, please KINDLY let me know. I'm very familiar with the fact that some people get arrogant and downright rude at times regarding posts.
