19990222: PC Hardware reqmnts

>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