how balance your background and foregroup resources in the OS?

>Thanks all for the replies people. Here is what I have tried so far:
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>(See original message for details.)
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>Ran a new cable from the switch to the Dell.
>Ran Dell's utility to wipe the drive and set everything back to just out of the box settings.
>Installed NetBUEI.
>Removed the Modem card.
>Disabled virous chacking.
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>Nothing changed. If no other computer has a file open then it's fine. If any other computer has files open then it takes 2-3 seconds to open each each shared file. The type of table buffering seems to make no difference.