Weird network & file opening issue?

[Darren S]

The answer's probably looking right at me, but I can't see the wood for the trees at the moment! Here's the scenario:-

• Head Office (HO) and depot across the road are connected via 1Gbps fibre
• HO is the location of the NAS box with shared folders on it
• Depot is where Lenovo laptop is located - accessing shared folders on NAS box at HO
• When the laptop tries to open an Office document - .xls, .doc, etc it takes around 90secs for the file to open up on the laptop. This is irrelevant of filesize - most files are less than 100KB in size.
• When the laptop tries to open up anything else - pdf docs, etc from the shared folders, they open up instantly. Some pdfs are quite large too - over 20MB in size and they have no problems at all in opening.
• Bring the laptop over to HO and everything opens up quickly - including Office docs
• Take it back to the depot and even logged on as admin, it has this bizarre delay on Office docs.
• Right at the start of this, I thought Office itself might be the problem, so that has been reinstalled - inc. the deletion of the Microsoft Office folder. I haven't cleared anything from the registry on the laptop, however. Office is 2003 with SP3 installed.

Is there anything blatantly obvious that I'm missing? I currently feel like I've taken my broken car to a garage and that I'm about to be told that its out of petrol!

D.

 

[H182]

In my computer/explorer etc:

Tools, folder options, view, untick 'automatically search for network folders and printers'

Done.


Worked in my experience anyway. Same issue, fine at HO but slow at remote sites, even if the file was local on the laptop!

 

[Darren S]

Cheers H - just tried that, but it's still taking ages to open up. More head-scratching is required, I think!

D.

 

[Longy]

Got any mapped drives?

 

[DMS]

Try disabling your antivirus software before attempting to open the file.
It's possible that the AV software's on-access scanner is preventing the file from being opened until a full scan of it has been performed.

 

[H182]

Another one I tried:

Try this
1.) Open My Computer.
2.) Go to Tools -> Folder Options, and click on File Types.
3.) Find the extension of the file in question (XLS, DOC, etc.)
4.) Highlight the extension, and click \"Advanced.\"
5.) Highlight the \"Open\" Action, and click \"Edit\”
6.) Click into the \"Application used...\" field, and scroll to the end
of
the command.
7.) Put a space at the end, and type in \"%1\" (With the quotes.)
8.) Uncheck \"Use DDE.\"
9.) Click \"OK.\"
:: ::
Open Tools, Options, and check "Ignore other applications that use DDE"

Failing that I'm out of ideas.

 

[bigmouk]

Just as another check, you could install open office check if that open the ms docs ok. If it does then it must be a problem with MS Office. Maybe try with word viewer aswell. Might help narrow down the issue.

 

[Darren S]

Got any mapped drives?

There are a few m8, yep.

Thanks for the other suggestions chaps - I'm out the office tomorrow, but I'll be giving those suggestions a try on Thursday.

Cheers!

D.

 

[Longy]

Is it slow when you right-click the files?

What happens when you go to office app and open the documents from within that?

I've had this kind of problem before due to inactive network drive references in the registry.