Not sure I understand the problem...

Are you running the SAME processing twice, once alone on the server and once between your laptop and the server?
I guess my confusion comes when you say "both systems are not directly compatible", making me ask how it is that it all can be done on the server.

Anyway, there seems a (small) possibility that the HD on the server may be thrashing between 2 widely separate areas. That can make things very very slow. Using you laptop, on the other hand, the data would come down the wire (and go back) BUT the data to be wrien back could be cached (until RAM is needed internally). This would have the efect of significantly improving speed if there is indeed thrashing ocurring.

just one possibility



>My laptop p4 1.84G and 1G RAM seems to perform the same operation over an ethernet network faster than the server.
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>The server is a windows 2003 system p4 3.2G, 2G RAM system.
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>This is the task being performed:
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>I am moving data from one system to another via ODBC. (Both systems are not directly compatable.)
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>Both data sources reside on the server. i.e. When I run the software from the server, there is no network traffic. Just hard disk reads and writes.
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>Yet my laptop out performs the server often by a 2 to 1 margin or better.
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>Is there some issues with FOX and memory? i.e. are there settings that can increase the performance. I know it is not a network thing as the server is running this weekend doing a task that took les than an hour on my laptop, and it is still running. There are no other users on the network but myself, and I am only monitoring it.
>
>Mike