On 30 Aug 99, at 12:23, Bob Wright wrote:

> At 10:18 AM 8/28/99 , Chan Fan Chong wrote:
> >
> >HDD - 8.4 GB
> >CD-RW drive for backup purpose
> >
>
> Understanding the the price range you intend for this system, this should
> be an excellent system, you can save you customer a few dollars by going
> with a regular CD writer drive instead of a re-writable drive.  The media
> for a standard CD writer is only 10% of the cost of re-writable disks.

  Although Bob is correct about the relative pricing of CD-R and CD-RW media,
there are so few CD-R drives still on the market that do not also do CD-RW that
I don't see much benefit to trying to stick to CD-R in selecting the drive.
[I know of no CD-RW drives that do not also do CD-R....]

  Note, though, that someday that 8.4 GB drive could be holding as much data
as 12 or more CDs, and that backup/restore software to use CD-R is still not
very common or mature.  I would not consider your backup solution adequate if
it relies on media that hold less than 2GB each, and 4GB would be better --
on that basis, I'd suggest looking at DAT or DDS-3 tape solutions.
  [This doesn't mean that they shouldn't have a CD-R/RW, just that it's not
realistic to regard that as their *backup* solution.]


> >Vga - any type with 32MB ram
> >Monitor - 19 inch
>
> In the case of your video card, I would go with a brand name high end 32mg
> card, instead of a generic.  Matrox makes good cards, though they tend to
> be slower, STB makes very fast cards and ATI has the RAGE 128 card, (the
> one I use), that is also very fast.

  I too have a RAGE 128, and am very happy with it, even though it has "only"
16 MB of RAM.  Note that at 1600x1200 resolution and 32bpp depth, 8GB should
be enough, and more is useful only when running 3D rendering software *that
takes advantage of it*.
  My hunch is that if your customer is doing 3D rendering that actually needs
more than 16 MB on the video card, they may want to consider one of the cards
that does OpenGL in hardware -- the last time I checked, these were in the
$500-1K range.


David G

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