Forum Moderators: phranque
What is the minimum configuration for a decent performing machine,
AMD based?
I'm adviced on the following configuration:
CPU: AMD XP2200+
Motherboard: MSI A7N8x (nForce2)
RAM: 2 X 256DDR (PC2100)
Graphics card: ATI Radeon VE 64MB
HDD: 80Gb HDD
Fan: Coolermaster HAC
Thanks for any advice!
Cheers!
Use Windows 98 as operateing system instead of XP. Windows XP slow down the processing speed. The configuration is quite good.
Navin
Use Windows 98 as operateing system instead of XP. Windows XP slow down the processing speed. The configuration is quite good.
Sorry Navin, but that would be silly on a modern PC of the specification he has. Windows XP is a far superior operating system, the first to come out of Redmond actually worthy of the title "Operating System".
XP does have a bigger memory overhead (but its always wise to make sure you have plenty of memory in any machine).
Its advantages massively outweigh any perceived 'slow down'.
a few good things for web development in XP..
- NTFS (proper file security, much better file integrity)
- Much more stable (no need to reboot 3 times a day)
- proper process control (good for crashed scripts etc)
- thumbnail browsing of pics, vids and html (very handy)
- better networking (no need to reboot everytime you change something)
But most importantly its the current Microsoft OS - so if you want to see things as your customers will then its really the only choice.
I'd agree with the advice not to take a step back to Win 98. If you want to reduce the processor load and footprint of the OS, you could consider Linux options, but with 512M RAM, 80G disk and and 2.2G processor speed, it is not likely to be an issue. No way would I ever recommend Win 98 over XP. Possibly 98 over Win ME, but not over XP.
To answer the original questions: The best thing I did was buy a dual head video card and 2 monitors. Even if one of the monitors is just a cheap 15" LCD or an old 17" monitor that you have lying around.
Other recommendations are:
- DVD burner for backing up a small office
- UPS in case of power fluctuations
Shawn
Windows XP slow down the processing speed
It's a myth. :) As dmorison says XP is by far the best MS OS ever ;)
Minliang :-
This looks more like a Power Machine rather than a decent Machine :). Have you given thought to Asus Motherboards? They are Very good for AMD processors IMHO. Also you might want a 80 GB HDD with 7200 RPM. Belive me there is a huge difference between 5400 & 7200 RPM. If you can afford go for 10,000 RPM HDD ;) HTH
<added>This 98 better than XP thing is so Prevelant in India I am really fed up of this :( </added>
Regards,
Minliang
What speed P3 do you have? I have a P3 650 and it is quite adequate for most of my work (Some Dreamweaver, mostly Homesite 5, Photoshop 6 and Fireworks MX doing both ASP and PHP). If all you plan to do is web dev work, your money may be better spent elsewhere. You might want to consider making sure you have the fastest P3 your motherboard can support, stuff your system with as much memory as possible and add a 2nd hard drive, then splurge on a dual-monitor capable video card and a 2nd monitor. I'm willing to bet that a 2nd monitor and tons of memory would give you far more productivity gains that the upgrade ideas you have listed. Now if you have other things planned for this PC (3D games perhaps?) then the upgrades you've listed sound fine. But otherwise, I'd recomend spending your money on getting a dual monitor setup and optimizing your current system.
Also, to chip in with the Win98 vs. XP, go with XP! Not only is XP far more stable and capable, it is noticably faster than 98, especially with plenty of memory (512MB or more).
Another advantage of Win2K/XP is that you can run Apache/PHP/MySQL really easily - Apache hardly works at all on Win98.
Finally, I would invest in as much RAM as you can fit in the box - RAM is dead cheap these days, and it will really help when you are doing heavy lifting in Photoshop, or editing videos.
Also, I agree you should consider upgrading your RAM. Especially if you are doing multiple updates using templates in Dreamweaver, it will make a difference. I was astounded at how quickly I could do updates etc with Dreamweaver when I jumped up to 1GB of RAM. Worth every single penny.
Looks like you're building a montster there :) I'd love to build a new machine - maybe soon ;)
As for Asus motherboards, aren't they more expenive than other brands? If the performance are the same, I'll rather take a cheaper motherboard.
Try Asus A7V266 Models of Motherboard. They might be a little bit Costly than the cheap motherboards but more than compensate in Performance then any other motherboards. I have Athlon XP 1700+ (clock speed 1.2 GHz) with 256 MB DDR (PC 1600) Ram, 80 GB Samsung Polaris HDD, Asus A7V266e MB and I am satisfied with the machine. Before purchasing the machine I had done extensive research and found Asus MB's to be better than others.
Please remember the 4 foundations of any Good Performance machines are (not in order of imp):-
1) CPU
2) Motherboard
3) Hard Disk Drive and
4) RAM
HTH :)
You may need to ask the folks who hang out at the *nix forum for a proper answer, but I'll offer my 2 cents worth: It can range from the old 486 you have lying in the garage and planned to convert into a boat anchor to a high spec'ed 2.2G pentium with 512M RAM and 80G disk. Just depends on what you want.
You can get a working Linux system on 65MB disk, but it would be really basic command line only. On the other hand, Redhat 9 with all bells and will need much more resources. So it really depends on what you want to do.
For development XP really is the best - and everything even looks better. I never thought I'd be sounding like an advertisment for the beast from Redmond but it hardly ever crashes - which is very handy if you are as slack with saving as I am.
I run FreeBSD 4-STABLE on a P133 laptop with 40MB of ram and a 2G disk (under 500MB of disk used for OS + applications). It works very well for me when developing web applications except when I get too many folds in a file in vim, which may take a few seconds to process. Other than that, it works beautifully! (No X, console only, by choice)
For gateway/firewall machines in a SOHO setting, you need even less power, I ran a 486/133 with squid for my parents home network until I got better hardware and upgraded.
My desktop is a PII-350, and runs great, better than win98, for sure.
The only annoying thing about WinXP (or maybe its this hardware here at work) is that sometimes the mouse moves all by itself, and often I can't position windows in 1px increments.
The only annoying thing about WinXP (or maybe its this hardware here at work) is that sometimes the mouse moves all by itself, and often I can't position windows in 1px increments.
Sounds like dodgy mice at your work.
I can confirm that I can move windows by 1px and I don't suffer from mouse jump unless I'm using my optical mouse (Logitech Mouseman Traveller.. great laptop mouse) on a paricularly shiny or bumpy surface.
That is what I was thinking. I could get away with a 133Mhz to 266Mhz with 32M to 48M ram and a 40 gig. I just want to setup a test/development machine on a very small intranet. And I could then port what I do, pretty much straight up, over to a Sun server? PERL, configurations, etc.?
Thanks
First let me caveat this by repeating that you may need to ask the folks who hang out at the *nix forum for a proper, authoratitive answer. But if you want a not so authoritative answer:
32M to 48M ram might be a bit light on if you want to run X. You'll get a working system but moving windows around might seem sluggish if you want to open a number of windows and move between them. Consider bumping it up to 64M. On the other hand, if this will just be used as a webserver to test cgi, etc, with all editing done on a different machine, then it should work fine.
With respect to speed, it will work but 133 is a bit close to the minimum threshold for comfort. 266 is better.
With respect to disk 40G is VERY comfortable. For a minimal system you could divide that by 10 and still have room to move.
Shawn
[added: OOPS... Just read drbrain's post properly: he is finding 40M ram 133MHz speed OK. Since he is talking from real experience rather than conjecture, I'd go with his recommendation. Then again, he is not using X, so perhaps our posts aren't contradictory]
>>But if you want a not so authoritative answer
Those are the best kind ;-)
I'm not going to run X. As a matter of fact I think I could get away without a keyboard and monitor if it wasn't for installing software and trouble shooting. I will test using XP on the intranet and just serve up the goodies on the Linux box. Heck, I bet I could even compile a 'C' file by just openning a telnet session to it. I think.
In 1986 you needed 2 monitors if you wanted to write Windows3.x software of any kind. Of course back then one had to be a text card and one a cga card. How do you switch between monitors?
You put the 2 monitors next to each other, and its just like one wide screen... As your mouse pointer disappears from the edge of the one screen, it appears in the adjacent screen. You drag windows between screens... Alt-tab switches between applications, regardless of which screen the application is on. You can even have an application span both screens (very wide spreadsheets ;) , or to see how your site will behave when presented full width on a 1600 x 1200 monitor.
Shawn
Also I would go with 7200rpm hard drives.
Other than that any processor over the 2ghz mark I think would be fine, get whatever offers the best price/performance ratio. I would not get the fastest one on the market, maybe the fastest one on the market 2/3 months ago.
As far as the OS, I would choose XP over 98 any day of the week. Far fewer crashes and the plug and play works so much smoother.
Hope that helps.
Also, I agree you should consider upgrading your RAM. Especially if you are doing multiple updates using templates in Dreamweaver, it will make a difference. I was astounded at how quickly I could do updates etc with Dreamweaver when I jumped up to 1GB of RAM. Worth every single penny.
What did you have prior to 1GIG? 256MB or 512MB?
Regards,
AW
What I also hate about XP is the user "management". User data is always in jeopardy when there's a problem, because since XP takes the liberty to "manage" all the user data in some idiotic sub-sub-sub-folders, it also takes the liberty to delete all of that when you need to repair or re-install XP, expecially stuff you have never considered (e.g. files on the desktop).
Needless to say that many great DOS games don't run properly in XPs emulation mode.
There's also a lot of other small stuff (e.g. how the task bar handles applications) that have become less handy with XP.
Otherwise (technically) I would agree that XP is far superior, but it seems like it's an old M$ strategy to build so many disadvantages into an otherwise great product that in the end, it sucks anyway.
there's no way to reconvert NTFS back to FAT32
Might wanna chack out Partition Magic 8 :)
User data is always in jeopardy when there's a problem, because since XP takes the liberty to "manage" all the user data in some idiotic sub-sub-sub-folders, it also takes the liberty to delete all of that when you need to repair or re-install XP, expecially stuff you have never considered (e.g. files on the desktop).
That's what I said in this thread Tips for setting up a robust Personal Microsoft Operating System [webmasterworld.com]
