Good morning everyone.

Currently the business I work for utilizes SBS 2003 Standard for our needs.  We have a somewhat 'aging' system (by today's standards), It's an Intel Pentium 4 @ 2.80ghz, 3gb ram, and plenty of hd space on a SATA RAID 5 array.   Currently we have less than 30 actual users.

The problems lately, is that the server seems quite sluggish.  Beyond the general maintenance of updating, defrags, etc, it seems that Exchange is really becoming a pain point and quite a PITA in particular.  Lately, and this is true for a very important user here (the boss) along with many other users, when using Outlook to connect to Exchange, the synched connection w/Exchange pops in an out on a whim and many times quite often. Personally I see this switching from my mailbox to the support mailbox and back again, though users are seeing this as well.  The big guy's email box is less than 200 megs so it's not like he's got a whopping ammount of storage here on the server.  He sees the problem locally in the office (though part of the local issue is the bad wiring in that office and I've partially offset that for now with a new gigbit switch as the old one was half dead with dead ports and the like, and we'll be running new ethernet direct from the server room over to him to circumvent bad wiring).  Externally, he's seeing it as well.  We use VPN here for external usage, though the standard OWA is available as well, though not widley used.  He's seeing the issue when connected via the VPN, though the VPN connection remains solid, the Outlook connection to Exchange pops in and out and as he puts it, and I 100% agree, its quite annoying when trying to use email to send and recieve.

Granted we run nightly incremental backups and weekend full backups that really shouldn't interfere with Exchange as such, and at least I've narrowed down the issue to the fact that its not an external DNS, ISP thing as it happens internally, externally, etc. 

Now, when using the SBS, things take forever just to login, open up, etc. Makes it hard to do quick maintenance, add users, etc.  Here are the current stats I can give you regarding server usage: It's 10am now, so primetime usage is up and going....

Current processes: 72
CPU Usage: 14-60%
Commit Charge: 2873M/7440M
Store is using: 996,999k roughly (so a gig?)....
Performance is spking here and there but relatively low as far as CPU usage.
PF usage: 2.77gb
Handles: 369xx
Threads: 1350 rouhgly

Physical Memory: Total: 3136788, Available: 222428, Sys Chache: 291576

Commit Charge: Total 2907xxx , Limit: 7619260 Peak 2977628
Kerne Mem: Total  1204xx Page 59856 Non Paged 60524