Varying speed of access

WD Legacy Products My Book Live
1

Here’s a question that I hope someone here might be able to answer.

One of the users on my network uses Microsoft Word 2003 on a Windows XP machine to open word documents in a shared folder on the My Book Live.  I do the same thing from my Windows 7 machine using OpenOffice.

The speed at which I can get folders and subfolders to open and display their content is pretty quick.  Maybe a tiny bit slower than a local hard drive directory, but not much.  But when the other user uses a “Network Device” icon to access the same folder, it is very slow to display the contents.  It takes like half a minute or so.  This is using a network location that does not have a drive letter mapped to it.

But if they (the XP user) uses a mapped drive (with an assigned drive letter) from the My Computer group, it opens and displays contents pretty quickly.

Any reason for this?  I’ve heard that mapping network drives with drive letters can speed things up , but don’t know why.

the HumpMan

2

probably because it’s taking some time to “Find” the MyBook Live on the network when you provide a URI.

It has to do a broadcast (or consult WINS) to find the Master Browser, interogate the browser to find out where the MBL is on the netowork, then establish the connections.

All of that is done at boot-time for a mapped drive.

3

This is sort of what I thought.  I am new to the details of how PC networking works and didn’t know about the “Master Browser” concept where other network members can go to locate network resources.  It all makes sense, as long as you know what’s going on behind the scene…

Thanks.

4

HumpMan wrote:

 It all makes sense, as long as you know what’s going on behind the scene…

 

Thanks.

I DO know what’s going on behind the scenes.   It still DOESN’T make sense!   :smileyvery-happy: