Kent A. Reed wrote: > > Or you > could read Jon Elson's past emails and go dumpster-diving* for older PCs > like the Dells he's had such good luck with. They might cost you nothing. > The Dell Optiplex line is their "industrial grade" line as opposed to their home grade line. I can't tell the difference by looking at them, but there is SOMETHING different. I have had several of these Optiplex machines running for 6+ years of continuous on-time as servers, and they have been amazingly reliable. On the CNC machines, I often go for older models, and they end up becoming obsolete before they fail (too little memory, mostly.) There used to be a bunch of eBay sellers selling off-lease Dell Optiplex machines from warehouses full of them, and you could get a really good machine for about $75 delivered, usually with keyboard and mouse, no screen. I don't think these great deals are still available, but if you watch for a while there should be a few turn up. One of the special reasons I prefer these is I know the parallel ports work perfectly in EPP mode. This used to be a BIIIIG problem for me, as the CNC motion boards I sell need the EPP mode to work properly. With my boards, it is not necessary to have the top CPU speed, as the motion control board does the time-intensive work. a 600 MHz CPU will still run fine with these, although if you do much editing, etc. at the machine, then a faster CPU will give snappier response when EMC2 is running. 1 GHz and 512 MB of memory will suffice for most purposes.
If you will be using software-generated step pulses, then a faster CPU is pretty important. Jon ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Start uncovering the many advantages of virtual appliances and start using them to simplify application deployment and accelerate your shift to cloud computing. http://p.sf.net/sfu/novell-sfdev2dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
