I admit it right up front. I have a bad-ass computer. Beginning with my Altair (anybody remember those?) and working forward, I've always built my own computers, with the exception of my last one, which I bought in a moment of temporary insanity. It was a game-but-lame little Gateway with a Core Duo processor and 2GB of RAM. Now that is gone and I'm typing this on a homebuilt AMD Phenom II 6-core with 16GB of RAM, a wicked fast graphics card, a nice solid-state drive, and all the trimmings.
The cost for all this luxury? A thousand bucks and change. Much less than most people think, a little more than half the price of a 3000. Two hours of my time to assemble it, another two hours to install the OS, reload the apps, and move over the data. What's my point? Well, I made the remark a few days ago that a good radio needs a good computer. Ever since, people have been chiming in to report that they have old or small computers that run PSDR just fine. "The latency is short enough that I've gotten used to it and it mostly doesn't bother me," said one of our faithful, who took me to task in a private email for being a computer snob. Although someone will probably chime in to say that they are able to run PSDR with a germanium crystal, a cat's hair, a bobby pin, and two rubber bands, we continue to hear all the little bits of guidance: You'll need to run GBoost...run Autorun...turn off services...get a registry optimizer... I appreciate that some folks (like me!) are workin' stiffs without a lot of extra cash. But we all saved up for our Flex radios and we can all save up for good computers. And then we won't need GBoost or Autorun or PC Optimizer. We won't need one computer to run the radio and another to do everything else. We won't have to worry about latencies or CPU usage. We can just play in the radio sandbox. A good radio needs a good computer. _______________________________________________ Flexedge mailing list [email protected] http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexedge_flex-radio.biz This is the FlexRadio Systems e-mail Reflector called FlexEdge. It is used for posting topics related to SDR software development and experimentalist who are using beta versions of the software.
