Inside Nspire

I recently had a very interesting conversation with an IT consultant working on the board of a very large Church using Nspire.  He began to get complaints about problems with Nspire crashing and staff not being able to open Nspire this past summer. What he found was interesting and I am afraid typical for most churches. The Church is large around 5000 in attendance with over 100 staff and volunteers. When they purchased Nspire they thought they needed to put it on the fastest computer on the network to share. Their server was older and already struggling with Exchange. This computer happened to be their newest XP pro machine. Thinking they were good to go they began to share and use Nspire. It did not take too long before they were plagued by crashes, dropped connections, and very poor performance. All with no apparent reason. It took some time before they found the problem and it was XP Pro.

After some research they found this document from Microsoft, Inbound connections limit in Windows XP.(http://support.m icrosoft.com/kb/314882) It explained everything. This is a quote from the document..

This means that if your Church is using an XP Pro based server, you can have at the most 10 users simultaneously connected and if it is XP home based only 5. But wait there is more…if you are sharing a printer, other files, and Nspire depending on what resources you are using the number of users could be much less probably around 3-4 in this case. Because any shared resource counts, it will not take to long to run out of connections.

Nspire and other databases are very sensitive to this connection limit. Since Nspire requires a continuous connection to operate properly, any connection drop will cause it to close.