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>From: "MSgt David A. Smith, DFEG, 3-2553" <address@hidden> >Organization: USAF Academy >Keywords: 199902221908.MAA24061 PC Dave, >I'm trying to wire together a PC-based solution to run LDM/GEMPAK here at the >USAF Academy. Have you published or do you know of any site running an >effective platform purely by PC? There are several sites using PCs for the various packages that we distribute. We are one of them. >I'd like the hardware/software solution for >the lowest-end operable platform.We'd try to equip much more robustly after >minimum is known. The real key to getting a PC is to first decide which operating system you want to use. You will use this information in your order to whoever you decide to purchase from by requiring the vendor to certify that the various components of the PC will work with that operating system (this will be OS version specific). As to what the lowest-end system may be, I can tell you that one site has had success running on a 166 Mhz Pentium machine with 64 MB of RAM. I would not use this class of machine as a basis for your purchase, however. In order to get things working, the user had to carefully configure the amount of data the machine gets and decodes via the IDD (the more decoding you want to do, the more CPU and disk you need). A more reasonable _minimum_ system would be a 300 Mhz Pentium II machine with 64 MB (better 128 MB) of RAM and a 6 GB disk. I would strongly recommend that whatever system you do purchase be more modern. Today, one can purchase a 450 Mhz Pentium machine with 128 MB of RAM and a 13 GB hard disk for $1800 (Sony VAIO comes to mind, but I have never checked to make sure that it will run either Solaris x86 or RedHat 5.2 Linux). >Much thanks and regards, I hope that this helped. >MSgt Dave Smith >Supt, Meteorology Lab >USAF Academy Tom Yoksas