RE: Recommended PC Hardware

[Brooks Fancher <bfancher at bham dot lib dot al dot us>]

I just timed mine, and it opened up in 76 seconds, including the time
it took for me to type in my password and connect through a rather busy
T1 back to our Innovative server. The machine I used has a 3.2 P4 with
1gig of ram. I also am seeing better times with switching programs back
and forth with our new machines. 



On my office machine with its 3.2 P4 with 1gig, I currently have
millenium open a firefox instance with 8 tabs, my security door
monitoring software, Mozilla Thunderbird, Winzip, Adobe Acrobat 7,
Microsoft Access and an explorer window open and switching from one to
the other is a breeze. This is actually a middlin load for this
machine, as my memory commit charge is only about 500 mb right now.
Sometimes I will hit 700+ megs of ram used. I did notice a small
difference with turning on the hyperthreading of the processor, over
having it off.  I would  avoid a non-hyperthreaded processor like the
Celeron if you are going to be doing heavy multi-tasking. I would also
make sure to keep the memory modules the same, as the newer P4
processors run better due to dual channel memory architecture. If going
with 512, get two 256 modules installed. The difference doing using
dual channel and hyperthreading under heavy loads is noticeable. 



At our circ desk, I am using 2.8 P4s with 512mb of ram and I really
cannot tell a major difference between it and my office machine, but
they never run the load that I do in my office, usually they have up
the web-opac, our state virtual library, millenium and maybe a word
document.



We do still experience some random freezing, but this appears to be
where the T1 is getting saturated or something like the
transaction file is getting full on the server. I do know that the
amount of freezing and the weird slow switching of the menus has been
reduced since going to these new machines. The old machines were PIII
600 with 384mb of ram.



Brooks Fancher




  I found the following exchange in the list archives.  I'm wondering if 1) The increased speed did indeed help at Greenwich Library, and 2) If anyone else has any thoughts on this topic.  I didn't find many replies in the archives.  We're wondering if upgrading our staff machines would help much with problems like slow opening of the Millennium client.  We're already using Pentium III processors with 512 MB RAM, but Millennium takes at least two minutes to open, even on machines that use the module being opened every day, and it slows all other applications being used down significantly in the process.

Thanks in advance for any information.

Maurine McCourry
Technical Services Librarian
Hillsdale College

maurine dot mccourry at hillsdale dot edu



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Welcome to Adobe GoLive 5





Brooks





bfancher at bham dot lib dot al dot us

http://www.homewood.lib.al.us






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