Network Drive Access Problems

[HamHam]

Hello,

Currently, I have a small network that has five computers. One computer acts as a server and shares its harddrive for the other computers to access files. All of these computers are XP ( 4 of them are SP3, 1 of them is sp2) and all have Norton AntiVirus 2009. Once a week, usually everytime in the morning, all of the computers are unable to access the shared harddrive. I get an error that the connection is lost or that the maximum amount of connections has been exceeded. I usually get these one of these two errors on all of the computers, sometimes maybe one computer (sp3 one) can aceess the harddrive, but that is all. The rest of the computers cannot.

What I usually do is restart the computer with the shared harddrive, but when I try to restart it, it hangs at the shutdown screen, I wait about 10 mins and manually turn it off. This computer only has this problem when the network problem happens. Any other time, the computer shuts down fine. After I force a shutdown, everything works fine afterwards.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what I can do? Sometimes I access the computer with the shared drive at night via "go to my pc", but most of the time I use that without causing this shared drive access problem.

Thanks for your help,

Ham

 

[imported_snikt]

You could always just try restarting the Server service on the PC that's hosting the files as an option before rebooting it. When you have these access issues on the PC hosting the files, check Event Viewer for any errors and go from there.

 

[HamHam]

Hello,

I checked the event log and found this error.


"The server was unable to find a free connection 9 times in the last 60 seconds. This indicates a spike in network traffic. If this is happening frequently, you should consider increasing the minimum number of free connections to add headroom. To do that, modify the MinFreeConnections and MaxFreeConnections for the LanmanServer in the registry."


Do I have to change a value in the registry to fix this?

-Ham