How to check integrity of Windows Vista Network

I am using Windows Vista. I want to setup certain systems on the network and create a common shared folder. There is basically an accounting software which I use in my office and other users feed data in that. Now I had noticed that the software consume some time in order to process a query. I had kept a nas drive separately connected which backups the files of Vista system. I do not want to go for Windows server and all as I found them complicated to use. I need some help to find the integrity of Windows Vista network. All I can see that the network is stable, but there can be some tools that can help me to keep an eye on the regular lan issues.

Network Integrity Monitoring consist of various things. It is not just finding why your network is slow as it also helps to find possible causes and threats. I am going to explain this here in a much broader way. So that you can figure out how this all works.

There are certain tools for Integrity monitoring. This tool will help you get day to day result about your network performance. You can keep them in your system and some of them scan the network for hours. Second comes the hardware issue. You might be aware that as the time passes the hard drive used in system keeps on slowing down. The life reduces. So it is also necessary to keep a track on your hardware. What hardware is installed in your system and from how much time the same is being used. Run disk cleanup, defragmentation, etc to get your drive to work better. The network process sometime even slows down because of this. Scheduling disk cleanup. This will wipe out not needed files and speed up the data process a bit. If you can upgrade your network hardware then it is much better. It will smooth up your lans performance. Monitoring tools might make your lan more slower. The best thing to check the statistics is from the router itself.

If you want to find how much your network can perform then you can use a tool called Network Diagnostic Tool. This is an awesome tool to find the lan connectivity by running more than 30K query at a time. This one of the best thing to find the limit of your network. Download it from here - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/downl....aspx?id=17811