Pulling a lot of Fox data across a wireless LAN is a bad idea, period.

Let's take the best-case scenario, where your wireless router or AP is a good-quality 802.11n unit. Now you go around and eliminate all wireless devices that are not 802.11n, preferably making them all adapters from the same maker as your router/AP. From reviews I've seen, best-case throughput for a single client with file transfers is generally about 100Mbit/sec, maybe 125Mbit/sec if you're lucky. It can be a lot less:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/802.11n-wireless-router-access-point,2605-18.html
http://www.bradreese.com/aruba-test.pdf

If you have multiple clients contending for the bandwidth, overall performance is less.
If you're supporting non-802.11n devices, depending on the router/AP, that can make overall performance drop.
If you have radio-opaque walls or other obstructions, performance will drop.
If Jack turns on the microwave to heat his lunch burrito, performance will drop.
If Jill has a Bluetooth mouse/keyboard near her laptop, her performance will drop, maybe others nearby too.

One thing that can be said, 802.11g is also subject to the same problems, and you're probably getting only a fraction of its theoretical 54Mbit/sec throughput. So, if you *did* upgrade to 802.11n all-round, you could see 3x, 4x, maybe 5x performance improvement. And maybe that would be "good enough".

But, why would you do that, when you could go wired? Wired is the honey badger of networking:

- Microwave? Wired don't care
- Mix of clients? Wired don't care
- Nasty walls etc.? Well, wired isn't enough of a honey badger to drill the holes for you, but once you do, it don't care
- Bluetooth? Wired don't care
- Wireless crackers? Wired don't care

You can get 1000Mbit (1Gigbit/sec) performance inexpensively. Less than $50 for an 8-port switch. If you have to get an electrician to run a drop, budget $100 or so per drop. You can run multiple cables (2 or more) for that price. If you have users clustered in groups, you can reduce the number of drops you need by putting in additional switches at the clusters, and running patch cables to the users. Even if you have 10 users sharing one cable back to the "server" you're getting better bandwidth than 802.11n.

If you absolutely, positively have to use wireless, then Brandon is right, the best solution is some sort of remote session product. Microsoft's preferred offering is Remote Access/Remote Desktop/Terminal Services, but as Brandon points out there are other options.

>Sorry it's a peer to peer wireless network, the problem is that at most locations the salesmen like to keep the laptops far away from each other for business reasons and in between there could be people walking so that makes it tough to have a wired setup but it's something to consider for sure.
>
>Not to familiar with wireless networks, but we just got a few new laptops that I think are using 802.11n technology and the old ones have 802.11a/g I think, wouldn't this be a huge factor with the speed issues as well?
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>thanks.
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>
>>>Hello guys,
>>>
>>>I inherited a POS application that is having issues with speed. Basically there's one laptop who is the "server", it has all the data, and the other laptops are the "checkouts" which connect to the server via a wireless network and access the data, just the server and usually 1-3 checkouts. Of course one problem is that foxpro is bringing all the data over the wireless network and as more checkout laptops are added to the network it begins to crawl (even though the tables are not that big), actually adding just one checkout it crawls. The code is a combination of everything since a few programmers have had their crack at it.
>>>
>>>It would be nice to rewrite the app but that's not in the cards right now, just coding for new requirements, so my question would be what suggestions you guys have to try to make the checkouts faster? (code strategies/hardware changes/etc)
>>
>>Running a file/server VFP app across a wireless network is, IMO, worse than a bad idea, it's bad practice. Your best bet will be to buy a small gigabit switch ( 8-port is probably big enough ) and run some Cat5e cable to each location. That, by itself, should be enough to make your speed issues go away.
>>
>>Also ensure that antivirus on both the "server" and all "checkout" computers is not real-time scanning the VFP data tables and VFP temp file folders on all computers.