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Computer Systems
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This page was one of the first on our web site and has been periodically updated as time has gone on. We have decided to leave the earlier sections as it gives a fascinating history of how home computers have changed in power and peripherals over quite a short time. Whilst working we existed for many years with just two HP palmtops of our own to which we added a Dell Dimension XPS P120C computer in January 1996, a Toshiba Libretto 50CT Laptop in March 1998 (75 Mhz Pentium and 850 Mbyte disk) and a Dell Dimension XPS P700r in April 2000. Since then the basic principle of having two desktops and a laptop connected by a hardwired (and latter WiFi network) providing Broadband Internet access from all machines and mutual backup has remained although the machines have been progressively upgraded and replaced in a way that we waste as little as possible, for example we are still using our original monitors.
The Dell XPS 120c was the first machine to replaced and was superceeded for a period by a Tiny machine with a 200Mhz Pentium processor, Widows 98 SE which also had USB ports enabling us to use a USB broadband modem. This machine was a cast-off from a neigbour whose son needed more power for games and was one that I had already set up modems and video cards for and was new enough to have an ATX motherboard with USB 1.1 ports and an ATX power supply. This happily ran Windows 98 SE and had sufficient power to act as our Internet access machine with a Firewall and ICS software for broadband and kept us in business for an extra couple of years for the cost of an extra 64 Mbytes of RAM. It finally ground to a halt as virus checkers became slower to keep abreast of the latest threats and it finally became incapable of also running a firewall and a WiFi connection.
Fortuitously at the point when the Tiny had reached its end of life we were offered a Gigabyte Triton Motherboard with an AMD Athlon 2500+ processor and 256 Mbytes memory and we set about building our first machine from scratch. The motherboard specification was much as we would have chosen and almost the same power as the two Dell 2400 machines I had specified for a local firm. It had a built in video of more than adequate performance and on board network, USB 2.0, Audio, Serial and Parallel ports. I hoped to make use of the existing Tiny case but that used a cut down ATX form factor motherboard which was even smaller in one direction than the microATX form factor of the GigaByte motherboard. Cases however have come down so much in price that a Dabs (www.dabs.com) own brand case with a 400 watt power supply was only 21 pounds. It even had a front panel USB connector. It is however Chinese and very lightly constructed so next time i would spend more time specifying and purchasing a good case or reuse of of the earlier Dell cases which are first class for strength and access.
We did a trial using existing small floppy, hard drive, keyboard, monitor and mouse to make sure it would at least boot up in DOS, recognise a hard drive and run a bootable CD before purchasing a 80 gigabyte hard drive and a Sony CD writer. We wanted a system which could be booted to both Windows 98 SE for legacy hardware and applications and Windows XP for normal use and we firstly built a 98 SE system up which enabled us to check we had all the motherboard drivers and could check everything before investing in another copy of Windows XP. The building of systems and the searches for drivers will be covered fully in the Installing or Rebuilding Windows Systems page. It is sufficient to say that we have ended up with a machine which should be powerful enough to satisfy all our requirements for our prime machine for at least 2 years and probably considerably longer yet can still be booted up as a Legacy system to access our old software and hardware including our scanner.
The Gigabyte machine and the Dell XPS 700 now share the 19" monitor, mouse, keyboard, microphone and speakers via a Belkin 2-Port KVM Switch and the Gigabyte machine and the latest laptop are now both multiple boot to Ubuntu Linux which has largely replaced our use of Windows see Fun with Ubuntu Linux for more details. The following concentrates on the desktops and our experiences with the Libretto 50CT and its successors, a Toshiba Portege 3440CT and a Toshiba Satellite Pro L20, both still in use, are covered in more detail in the page on Mobile Computing and Ubuntu Linux on the Move.
Triton - Gigabyte Motherboard based machine
Triton Specification
- AMD Athlon 2500+ processor
- Gigabyte Triton mATX motherboard with onboard Video, Audio, Network, 3 PCI slots, 1 8xAGP slot, 2 PC2700 memory slots, 6 x USB2 ports and serial and parallel ports.
- Dabs 'value' generic ATX case with 400 watt PS
- 1x 256 and 1 x 512 Mbyte PC2700 memory.
- 80 Gbyte Seagate drive partitioned for dual boot Windows 98 SE and Windows XP SP2 with additional 160 Gigabyte Seagate drive used for video
- External USB 250 Gbyte Hard Drive for backup and video shared in use with Dell
- Sony CD-RW 52x
- LG 16x DVD RW+/RW- Dual layer
- Floppy Disk
- 19 inch shared Monitor with Dell XPS 700r
Triton Internal PCI Cards
- Firewire card - 3 external and 1 internal. (Ebuyer generic 6.99)
- Safecom V92 Modem card (Ebuyer generic 5.99)
- Belkin Wifi card 56g
- Pinnacle studio video card
Dell XPS P700r
Dell XPS P700r Specification
- Pentium 700 Mhz "Coppermine" PIII Processor (256K Cache on chip)
- 128 Mb SDRAM
- Quantum Fireball LCT10 Fixed hard drive - 15 Gbyte not partitioned (FAT 32)
- Seagate Fixed hard drive - 80 Gbyte partitioned C: 16 Gbytes E: 32 Gbytes F: 32 Gbytes (FAT 32)
- Seagate Fixed hard drive - 40 Gbyte partitioned D: 8 Gbytes E: 32 Gbytes for video (FAT 32)
- Nvidia TNT2 M64 4xAGPVideo Card with 32M video memory (supplied)
- Floppy Disk Drive
- DVD and CD Rom Drive
- CD-RW Sony CRX140E
- 19 inch Dell M990 FST Monitor (normally set to 1024x768 16 or 32 bit true colour)
Dell XPS P700r Internal Cards
- Creative Soundblaster Live! Value (Audio card supplied)
- 3Com 10/100 Card (Network Card supplied)
- Askey V1456VQH-R ENG Internal ISA Modem Flashed to V90 (ex Tiny)
- Pinnacle Studio DVplus Digital Video editor card 1394 input and output + Video/SVideo +Audio Outputs
- Belkin 5 x USB 2 card
Tiny 200
Tiny 200 Specification
- Pentium 200 MX processor
- MSI motherboard with audio, 2 USB 1.1, serial and parallel ports.
- Tiny case
- 96 Mbytes PC66 memory
- PCI video card with 32 Mbyte memory
- 4 Gbyte hard Drive
- CD reader
- Floppy Disk
- 15 inch CRT ex Dell 120
Tiny Internal Cards
- Askey V1456VQH-R ENG Internal ISA Modem Flashed to V90
- 10 Mbyte ISA network card
- D-Link PCI Wifi Card
Dell XPS P120C
Dell XPS P120C Specification
- Pentium 120 Mhz Processor
- 48 Mb EDO RAM (Initially 8Mb)
- 256K Pipeline Burst Mode Cache
- Fixed hard drive - 4.3 Gbyte Quantum Fireball partitioned into two drives (C: and E: FAT32)
Originally single 850 Mbyte Western Digital drive (FAT 16)
- Fixed hard drive - 2.1 Gb Quantum Fireball Drive D:
- Floppy Disk Drive
- 4x CD Rom Drive
- 9FX Video Card with 1M video memory
Internal Cards
- Hauppage WIN/TV Card for Video conferencing, Teletext, TV and Video Frame grab
- Soundblaster AWE64 Audio card
- Multifunction IO card providing additional parallel port. (Removed because of conflicts with Network card)
- D-Link DE-220 Ethernet 10-Base-T Card (UTP connection to hub)
External Hardware
- Epsom 66 Printer
- US Robotics 56K Faxmodem
- HP Colorado T1000E Backup Tape Drive on Parallel Port (Not in use)
- Novatech Scanner - A4 on Parallel port
- Creative Audio Speakers and Desktop Microphone
- 3Com Firewall/Wifi/ADSL/Router
Software
Preloaded Software
Dell 120
- Windows 95 (Updated to SR-1 then OSR2 then 98 SE)
- Office 95 updated to Office 97, 2000 and finally Office 2003
Dell 700
- Windows XP SP2
- Microsoft Works Suite 2000 (Autoroute and Encarta only loaded) plus Office 2003
Gigabyte
- Linux Ubuntu 6.06 'Dapper Drake'/Windows XP SP2/ Windows SE triple boot
- Office 2003
Email, Internet Access and Web site development Software
- McAfee Virus Checker Version 10 (Licenced)or Free AVG
- ZoneAlarm Firewall 6.5 (Freeware)
- Outlook 2003 Email and Contact management
- Evolution Email and Contact management
- Thunderbird Email
- Firefox Web Browser
- Internet Explorer 6 used to check sites(Microsoft Freeware)
- Adobe Acrobat PDF file viewer 7.0 (Freeware)
- WinZip 8.0 Zip utility (Licenced)
- Hotdog Pro 6.6 on Gigabyte (licensed)
- Hotdog Pro 5.5 (licensed free version)
- Arachnophilia 5.3 Linux compatible HTML Editor (CareWare)
- Irfanview (Freeware)
- Paint Shop Pro 4.12 - Graphics (Licenced)
- Canon Zoombrowser (Camera software)
- Google Picasa (freeware)
- Textbridge Classic OCR software (With scanner)
- OU First Class 7 - two copies to allow Offline use on two servers.
- Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) version 8.02 (freeware)
- TrueCrypt encryption (freeware)
- JLIP Video Captue and Video Producer - JVC Software for GR-9500 video camera
- Pinnacle Studio DVplus 7.15 Digital Video editor on Dell 700
- Pinnacle Studio DVplus 10.6 Digital Video editor on Gygabyte
- Powerpoint ActiveX Publisher/Plugin (Microsoft Freeware)
- WS_FTP LE (freeware)
- Audiograbber (freeware)
- Windows Defender (Microsoft no cost)
- Skype (freeware)
- AIDA32 system tools
- EndItAll background Program stopper (Ziff Davis Freeware)
- Partition Magic 8 (Licenced)
- Nero 6 (supplied with drives)
Original Rational for Specification and Choice of Dell XPS 120C
The original specification was derived from an assesment of what we needed a home computer to do which then led to the hardware and software specification. The following is an almost direct copy of the file off the HP95 where the requirements and specifications were worked on over Xmas 1995. The options looked at are in priority order and
square brackets were low priorities.
User Requirement
Industry Standard Word Processor.
- Word
- Wordperfect
- AmiPro
Industry Standard Spread Sheet.
- Excel
- Lotus 123
Presentation Graphics
- Black and White Printed
- [Colour Vugraph]
File interchange with HP95
File interchange with HP200
FAX send
- From PC files
- [From documents (ie Scanned)]
FAX reception
- By arrangement ie when PC in use
- [Unattended (24 hour)]
Internet and Email Access
- From Within UK
- [Worldwide]
Speed
The prime criteria here was to have the power to run the big programmes
such as Microsoft Office with a sensible response time. Both of
us had used Word extensively at work, in my case on a Dell Optiplex
466 and this led to a specification that we should look for a
basic increase of 3 times over a 486 66 MHz machine with 8
Mbytes of RAM using Windows 3.1. This required a:
- 120/133 Mhz Pentium
- Pipeline Burst Mode Cache (essential)
- 8/16Mbyte (EDO prefered)
Disk Capacity
- Windows 95 (50 Mbyte)
- MS Office (100 MByte)
- Fax system (4 MByte)
- Email/Internet (10 Mbyte)
- HP95/200 Communication package (2 MByte)
- Faxes 500 pages (100 MByte)
- Text 20000 pages (100 MByte)
Leads to Absolute Minimum of 500 MByte Drive Note in 2003 - the current 2 + 4 is still viable but the 850 on the Libretto is a very serious limitation with current software.
Virus Checking
Monitor
Based on experience
Input/Output Devices
- Floppy Disk
- Quad CD drive
- External Fax/Modem 28.8 (High Speed Serial port ie 6550 UART)
Future Expansion Bay, Slot or port requirements
- Backup (Internal Tape Streamer?)
- Sound Wave Table (ISA slot)
- TV etc (PCI slot)
The Selection
The System
A number of machines were looked at including those from Dell,
Gateway, Dan, Evesham, Mesh and Tiny.
Dell won by being a good £200 below the price/performance
curve of all other options - largely because of the preloaded
software. Another factor was our previous good experiences as
far as reliability of other Dell machines.
8Mbyte of RAM was ordered on the expectation prices would fall
allowing an additional 16Mbytes to be added within 6 months. Current
indications was that a progressive upgrade was cost effective
The Software
- Microsoft Office - our favorite choice and part of bundle.
The Internet Service Provider
- CompuServe - chosen initially because of:
- world wide access,
- pricing policy,
- services
- and software.
- We now mainly use:
- Freezone - Default Email with Free Virus checking. Main Web space limited but to 500 Mbytes and 10 Gbytes/month bandwidth on our Domain name.
- FastHosts - Uniquely New Zealand web site because they offer 500 Mbytes web space and unlimited bandwidth.
- Tiscali - broadband and low priority email
- Xtra whilst in New Zealand for DUN connection.
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