Network Instability

Hi

For my sins I am the nominated mug that has been
designated responsibility of running our office network. I
have only a sketchy understanding of how all this works so
I have some questions:

We run a 6 workstation P2P network where all machines run
W2000P
The network is set-up so that the gateway has a fixed IP
address but the rest of the machines find IP automatically.

This set up is proving to be extremely unreliable in that
the network connections can be very fickle. Contact between

machines is seemingly 'lost' for little clear reason.

- Would making all IP addresses fixed improve reliability?

- Is this just the nature of P2P networking? You can get
by at a push?

Finances are extremely limited. At this stage a decent
server is out of the question. If I purchased Win2000
server I could load it onto one of our workstations. There
would obviously be a steep learning curve but I could do
with some indication of how complex system management has
to be.

- Is this a practical solution? A dedicated server could
be purchased at a later date.

- Can I still use the new 'sever/workstation' as a
workstation, running Photoshop / CAD applications or will
this put too great a load on the system. The machine I am
proposing to use is a P4 1.8G with 2 hard disks. It only
has 256MB of ram so I would propose increasing this. How
much more would be required?

- Would I need to make this machine the gateway or can it
remain on a separate machine

- Can you recommend any 'starter' books or sites or
alternatively is it worth looking at any short/cheap
courses

Im sure there will be plenty of questions to follow but I
would appreciate any help on comments you can make.
Thank you for your time.

Tristram

OH! "the gateway has a fixed IP"

Read up on DHCP...
Learn What/Who is the Gateway? the DHCP server? on your LAN

Would making all IP addresses fixed improve reliability?
*** Not realy, except if soneone is turnin off the DCHP server!

Is this just the nature of P2P networking?
*** No, its quite reliable, actually the same networking as with a server - just centralized Admin (UsersID and Such being in one place)

With 6 to 8 small office its mox/nix as to using a Server, depending on what the Office does... However forget about that that "The Server can be my workstation'!!! The Successful Server is Almost Always the Dedicated Server!
or something like that... maybe it's
A dedicated is always successful!
A dual purpose server/workstation is alway a problem!

Can you recommend any 'starter' books...
** Wiley - Building you Network with Windows 2000
Good book!