Gustav Brock
Gustav at cactus.dk
Fri May 4 07:10:20 CDT 2012
Hi all And so I did. After nearly 7.5 years my second IntelliStation has been set "at ease" in honour. It's still working fine but I missed too much a 64-bit OS, more than 2 GB ram, and some speed beyond that of single-core Pentium 4 at 2.2 GHz. So what to pick? I was tempted by workstations from Fujitsu and HP but in the end I couldn't do it; it had to be a ThinkStation as Lenovo's workstations are labelled today. At a broker I found a ThinkStation E30 7783 with a Xeon E3-1245 3.3 GHz quad-core processor with the integrated Intel HD Graphics P3000 and a 1 TB drive. I don't do much graphic work and zero CAD/CAM so this way I saved the cost of the (expensive) traditional add-on graphics adapter normally found in workstations. To speed it up, I replaced the boot drive with an Intel 520 SSD and added 8 GB ram for a total of 12 GB ECC ram. This way I can convert my old machine to a virtual hosted by the new machine. Now, this new friend of mine in its neat black minitower boots to login to our AD in 16 seconds, and the Windows Experience Index reports 7.9 for the disk, 7.6 for CPU and ram, and 6.4 for the graphics. Excellent for my purpose. Next question is if this will serve for 6.5 years, the average of its predecessors. That will be the time of Windows 10, touch screens, and who knows what. /gustav >>> Gustav at cactus.dk 14-06-2011 18:31:55 >>> Hi Rocky You could and perhaps should build your own if you have the time, think it is fun, and can live with the ugly boxes available for the purpose. Not me. So much else is more fun. My current IntelliStation (P4) has run for 6.5 years and still looks stylish. The upgrades have been ram, two SCSI disks, a USB-2 card, and a Plextor DVD-writer. Plug-and-Play. My former machine was another IntelliStation which ran for 5.5 years. The major problem I'm facing is that WinXP today is outdated and I can't and don't want to upgrade the OS as the next must be 64-bit. Guess what I plan to buy in the autumn. They are not IBM branded any longer, now it's Lenovo. Another option could be the Fujitsu range of workstations which we have very good results with at some clients. Anyway, you should go for a machine with a decent graphics adapter, a CPU with four or eight cores and/or an option for adding a second CPU. /gustav >>> rockysmolin at bchacc.com 14-06-2011 17:38 >>> Thanks Bill. Actually everyone else is considering that I build one. :) I'm still a bit reluctant.