Minimum Computer for Vixen

[buymyemu]

I am about to pick the following up from craigslist: 4 old PC's, 2 with no HDD, but working Power and DVD's to mount my FM02's.

I would like to make a dedicated PC to run just Vixen (Mighty Mini's year round soon).

I searched the threads, and saw a couple of posts, but..,.. what is the smallest, most underpowered PC that people use to run their show?

They are asking $30 for the following, the PSU's and DVD's are worth that to me.

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I have a small computer lot, 4 computers\. There are 2 pentium 3's and 2 amd k7's I believe. One p3 and one k7 are complete with ram (pc100, looks like all 128-256mb sticks) psu's, hd's cd drives or burners or dvd drives. They both power on with no error beeps and seem to run fine, one of them has win 98 ready to go, the other is a fresh format, both 30gb hd's. the two other computers are missing hard drives, but have ram dvd drives, or cd drives or cd burners. Have switched parts back and forth to power on test them, all power on, no error beeps and seem to run fine.

[dmcole]

Here is the official word:

http://www.doityourselfchristmas.com/wiki/index.php?title=Vixen#Minimum_System_Requirements

As with most things in life, more memory is always better ;-) ...

I'd say for $30, you're right: if only the PSUs and the DVDs work, you're made a fair deal; if you get a full machine out of the mix, so much the better.

\dmc

[Skunberg]

Pentium 266 with 256 Ram 40 Gig HD CD Win 98 SE, works O.k. with nothing else installed. Start adding anti-virus, firewall, adobe reader, ect. and the performance drops noticeably.

Brian

[buymyemu]

Pentium 266 with 256 Ram 40 Gig HD CD Win 98 SE, works O.k. with nothing else installed. Start adding anti-virus, firewall, adobe reader, ect. and the performance drops noticeably.

Brian

Looks like you run 160+ channels. Does it make a difference on performance (number of channels)?

Does something that old have usb ports?

[dirknerkle]

Looks like you run 160+ channels. Does it make a difference on performance (number of channels)?

Does something that old have usb ports?

Yes. The more channels you have, the more RAM and CPU speed you need because you're asking the computer to do more work. Whether the USB ports will work or not is a separate issue. If it has a PCI slot, you can always add a PCI-USB card... but think about it... adding memory, adding a PCI card... now you're kludging together something that you're trusting to run your show... Spending $50 on top of $30 (plus shipping?) to get an old box... You might do better just by contacting your neighbors and tell them you're scavenging computer parts and the rest is going to a local electronic recycling center -- if they have an old PC they want to get rid of, you'll take it. You'd be amazed what you'll get. You might get some seriously good gear for nothing that's at least as good as what you're looking at. Or you can contact any local business and ask the same thing. Pretty good likelihood there are several PCs they don't know what to do with.

[buymyemu]

That is a couple of good idea's, I would not want to spend anything to get these working, so scavenging it is. Just getting working power supply's and somewhere to house my fm02's would be great.

We are going garage saleing after my son's soccer game tomorrow, I can remember seeing PC's last summer, but did not have OCD back then.

Part of it is reliving the old days. Back when PC's came out I made a lot of money putting clones together, selling a PC with a seagate ST-225 20 mb hard drive and monochrome monitor for $2k.. I stopped when windows came out, so this is kind of fun.

It is also interesting to see what people are running for vixen: how low can they go.

[budude]

That is a couple of good idea's, I would not want to spend anything to get these working, so scavenging it is. Just getting working power supplys and somewhere to house my fm02's would be great.

We are going garage saleing after my son's soccer game tomorrow, I can remember seeing PC's last summer, but did not have OCD back then.

Part of it is reliving the old days. Back when PC's came out I made a lot of money putting clones together, selling a PC with a seagate ST-225 20 mb hard drive and monochrome monitor for $2k.. I stopped when windows came out, so this is kind of fun.

It is also interesting to see what people are running for vixen: how low can they go.

I traded my entire Commodore 64 setup to someone for my first PC - an IBM XT clone with 128K (no, I mean "K") of memory, 5MB hard drive and an amber mono screen - fun stuff...

[Skunberg]

Looks like you run 160+ channels. Does it make a difference on performance (number of channels)?

Does something that old have usb ports?

I started with 128 Ram and with only 48 channels it worked fine most of the time but sometimes it was sluggish. Bumped it to 256 before showtime. Worked great with up to 96 channels, haven't tested it higher but the channels are split between the two com ports. Two com ports but no USBs, no CDR. I got a much newer freebie that will be the show box now.

[christmas-light]

It is also interesting to see what people are running for vixen: how low can they go.

I have a dedicated PC for my show, it is with a dual core 2,66 GhZ CPU, 4 GB Ram and 100 GB HDD and 1 GB video card (wonder what I am using that for :lol: ) but I have also +600 ch

But this year I have decided try some thing new :)

I want to buy a Mac Mini Server with 8 GB DDR3 Ram and a quadro 2,66 Ghz CPU for my home network. Any way my plan is to install 4 virtual machines and one of these virtual machines is going to be a windows 7 there is going to run vixen :D

[WakeFan]

The current version of Vixen works on Win98, but future versions may not. The 3.0 version in the works was going to require XP or better if my memory serves me correctly. It's not out, so for now you are good, but something maybe to keep in mind.

[dirknerkle]

You might check out http://www.microcenter.com and look at item #427328. For $100 it's a refurbished, 2.8ghz P4 with 512mb, 40gb hard disk, cdrom and XP Home.

TigerDirect has some good deals for peanuts, too.

Another good source is http://www.cpponline.net My company has purchased lots of computers from them and used them to replace PCs at our customers' sites -- they've been just fantastic. If you go there, tell them you got the lead from Club Data -- and ask for Ron Girard (the owner). Good guy. Good friend.

[CheapOLights]

for several years my show ran on a Tangent, you've never heard of them and you never will. It was running on a 233MHz tangent core with xp pro. I never could make the clock work and the windows time base kept going wierd. To even free enough memory to load vixen, I had to drop all visual styles and run with a high contrast vector graphics theme. Even then it could only handle Vixen and the software interface to my FM transmitter.

This year my show runs on a Mac Mini. I had one lying around and it made a great machine to run the show because it was faster, had wireless built in, and it was a name brand device.

By the way: the tangent wasn't even supposed to be able to load xp; I pulled the drive out of a computer with a fractured motherboard and then rebuilt the init files to only load basic services.

[g2ktcf]

just make sure whatever you use can handle .net 4.0 for the new vixen release!!!

[ChiefWarrant]

Good to hear about the NET 4.0 thing. I was going to hit the flea markets this weekend for a Vixen dedicated computer. I talked to a guy last weekend about getting something "old," and the only thing I would be running would be XP(SP2) and Microsoft NET. He quoted me a price around $30-40.

I guess I need to look for the following.

◦Windows XP SP3
-Hardware Requirements:
-Recommended Minimum: Pentium 1 GHz or higher with 512 MB RAM or more (for NET 4.0)
-Minimum disk space: x86 – 850 MB


Thanks for the heads up.

Tony

[ErnieHorning]

Hardware and OS.

[JTLowry]

Thought give a heads up about the virtual machine handling your show. You might run into out-of-sync issues, since the host allocates the cpu cycles, and does tend to forget about a vm every so often. I noticed that the timing on my vm's vary by 2-4 seconds. Of course, I am upgrading me Show computer this year as well, just haven't figured out to what just yet.

James

[aixelsyd]

For performance boosts I would... Forgive me if you know all this can't hurt to repeat for some...

Set the virtual memory on the machine to be a specific size. It asks for a minimum and a maximum number. Make that number both the same as the max you want. This way when the page file is created it is the maximum size it will ever be. That will make it so the computer never has to fiddle with increasing it or decreasing it. Which for those older drives slows things down. Generally 2.5 times or so for the amount of real RAM for this setting.

If you are using an existing install of win98 make sure to de-fragment the drive. Always a good idea after setting the virtual memory.


Tweak-UI (http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/tweakui) can be used for a lot of things to make it better. Like automatic login and removing stuff that starts at boot up.

If the computer is for vixen only you could skip antivirus. Just be careful of course. Browsing the web from it would be a bad idea what with IE and Firefox that's available for Win98 being so out of date. Just safer to not network it...

-
Jason