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Why is VNC and Remote Desktop performance terrible on Dell 790s running Windows 7 Pro?

I have a network of about12 Windows 7 desktops. Out of these 12, two for some reason act very strange, mostly notable in the terrible performance of both VNC and Remote Desktop. On all other computers on the network, both remote access options work great. However on the two problem machines, VNC and Remote Desktop both are extremely slow, the connection drops every few minutes, etc. If you dial the VNC client used to connect the computers down to tight/low bandwidth you can use it a little bit before the connection drops. With regular VNC settings or remote desktop it drops even as the screen is initially loading.

The two problem boxes both happen to be Dell Optiplex 790s. Windows was installed from scratch on each. The fact it is happening on two machines, not just one, and they happen to be the same model indicates to me some sort of the problem with the hardware of those specific models. Otherwise, I have no idea. I have checked the network card and video card drivers via device manager and they seem to be installed properly. The whole thing is a mystery and driving me crazy as I need to get on these machines remotely almost everyday.

Any ideas?

johnb6767

Any chance there are OLDER drivers available, or a BIOS update even?

Any excessive processor/ disk/ netork utilization when it starts to crawl?

dzvette53

ASKER

Updated the BIOS to latest available from Dell. OLDER drivers I don't even know how to get, and even if I did, I don't have any idea which device it would be... video card, network card, chipset, etc.

I have been watching the task manager and can't identify any strange usage patterns. Processor and RAM remain reasonable all the time. It would make sense that network utilization is a problem yet it never seems to go above .5% in task manager. Seems odd that VNC settings indicate bandwidth flooding issues but network activity never seems out of line.

Still stumped on this.

Adam Leinss

Could be the TCP/IP Autotuning feature:

http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/microsoft/remote-desktop-slow-problem-solved.asp

dzvette53

ASKER

Hmmm. This seems like it could be it but I tried disabling and no immediate change. Unfortunate as that really actually made sense based on the problem behavior.

sjklein42

Run "PING -t" to one of the bad servers for a few minutes and see if there are any anomalies.

Also run PING -t to one of the good servers to compare.

dzvette53

ASKER

Interesting indeed. on the the problem machine, every so often one of the ping requests will timeout. I ti is only maybe one every 30-60 seconds but of course none timeout on the good clients.

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sjklein42

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dzvette53

ASKER

I think you are right, having someone go pick up a new network card now. Interestingly enough, the MAC addresses of the network cards in the two problem clients are nearly identical.

dzvette53

ASKER

In fact this did resolve it. Apparently there was at least a batch of bad network cards in Dell Optiplex 790s. I'm quite sure it wasn't a driver issue as the same issue occurred with drivers from Dell, Winodws Update, etc.

Thanks all.

Adam Leinss

Interesting, thanks for the feedback!