PC Hardware advise

[PJ ENG]

Ok we have 4 PCs all Running QuickBooks and networked with a router.

3 PC are all low speck 112 mb Ram no 4 has 1G of Ram, Quick books is on 1low speck pc ( with 3 other PC logged on to the company file) and Actinic V7 on another low speck pc, QuickBooks is our main program it has all our stock control on it.

I am thinking of setting up a server to put QuickBooks onto and Actinic is this best ? or would i be better buying 3 new hi speck base units ? Will a server speed up the flow of data

Advise would be helpful

PS also have V8 but have not used it as yet!

[Stereo Steve]

Running Actinic on Server 2003 is possible but can be a little tricky. For instance, server does not like '£' signs which is a challenge on an ecommerce site.

We tried but gave up after a while. We put together a very basic P4 PC using an Asus motherboard for under a couple hundred squid and use that purely as an actinic PC. A raid setup is handy as well for security. We don't do anything else on that PC apart from handling pics etc for the website and it results in a nice fast, unclogged PC for editing the site.

If the site is a big part of your income, then it deserves it's own machine IMHO. Decent PC's are really cheap nowadays. We also bought an Esys Celeron machine from Ebuyer for about £120 for general office use and it's brilliant to be honest. Just had to put windows on it.

[PJ ENG]

thanks for that steve, what speck would you go for ?

I have always looked at the Ram IE the more the beter ?

[pinbrook]

3 PC are all low spec 112 mb Ram

For v8 you'll need min 1gb RAM.

Are your current Pcs running XP as 112 RAm is minisule. XP runs like a dog on 256, so i can't imagine it on 128.

[Stereo Steve]

To be honest, most off the shelf PC's today should be able to run actinic with ease. You don't need the very latest. A good amout of RAM never hurt anyone. If you are thinking of running Vista then 2GB is probably advisable although ours run happily enough on 1GB and one of our Vista machines has 768mb and seems fine in generall use.

[Darren B]

I run actinic on a dual core pc with 1gb ram and vista reasonable database for actinic going back 4 years with excess of a million pounds worth of orders (not sure what this totals in number of orders) and 3.5k products.

It also doubles as an internal mail server and has paintshop pro plus other stuff on it, runs without an glitches at all.

It also only cost me £350 +vat so you could say this is alow spec model but it is faster than the pc i used to have all this on, xp m/c with 1gb ram but much slower.

hope this helps
Darren