Hello again, Thanks for all the recommendations.
It was reassuring to hear that older hardware will work fine, but I need to clarify something: due to my general dislike of the pee sea (PC) architecture, I have absolutely no, zero, zip, nada PC hardware already on hand, all our existing hardware is VAX, Sun SPARC or mainframe gear, nothing even remotely PC-compatible. Therefore, whether I go with new or used, either way I have to buy that PC or the complete set of parts for it somewhere. (The only exception is that we do already have a good Viewsonic monitor with PeeCee video input and PS/2 kbd & mouse which we intend to use for this workstation.) Which brings me to the following: if anyone on this list has any old PC hardware which meets the specs that have been discussed and which they would be willing to sell to us for a price less than what we would have to pay at a store for a new low-end system, let's talk. Chris Penn <[email protected]> wrote: > A different strategy could be to build a box for speed. The functions > you mention are pretty basic and can be done on a windows machine, so > I say make a box that can do them waaaaay faster. > [...] > Maybe a decent video card for compiz if > she wishes she had a Mac. Comparison with Weenzone/Mac is completely irrelevant in this case because the intended user of the workstation in question is my girlfriend who has already been required to give all that stuff up as a condition for our relationship. I have a policy that anyone who receives financial and/or emotional support from me (spouse, child, whoever) is required to use only those computing technologies which I approve on ethical grounds. Weendoze and MacOS are on the black list of prohibited stuff and so are GNOME, KDE and most definitely compiz or whatever the hell that is. If the spouse/child/whoever wishes to use Weendoze, MacOS, GNOME, KDE or compiz or whatever, they are more than welcome to do so, but in that case they must find some other place to live and some other means of support. > and a gigbit NIC. Completely useless given that our office network is strictly 10 Mbps (true coaxial Ethernet in the data centre, 10BaseT going out to the cubicles). The outside Internet connection is SDSL @ 384 kbps serving as an ARPANET replacement. > You gonna go 64bit? I would really prefer not to, just to make my sysadmin job easier. I hate admining modern Linux on pee seas as it is, I don't need the extra complication of however-in-hell does that Intel 64-bit stuff work... > [recommendations regarding software RAID] Completely unnecessary because the PC in question will never have anything of any value stored on it. If the HDD goes up in smoke, we throw it out, stick a new one in there and reinstall Slackware. All valuable information is stored only on the mainframe. > [OpenOffice stuff] We won't be using OO either, the company policy requires that all TPS reports be written in vi on the UNIX mainframe. As I've said, we need to put this PeeCee together to do web (Firefox), MP3s and video, stuff which absolutely positively cannot be done on the mainframe. Anything that can be done on the mainframe, regardless of how un-modern and user-unfriendly it is, is done on the mainframe. MS
