At last! A motivation behind all this. I was beginning to wonder. I saw a digital animation festival last night and was thinking of getting a new compute server. By my calculations a midsized PC passed even the CRAY-1 in compute speed sometime in 2002, give or take a year. It probably would require a stripped down O/S to do the computing. MS must take out at least 3/4 of the machine power. John A.

Not really, I'm running Win2K Pro here on a 'standard' system with half a gig of RAM which requires me to have a gig's worth of pagefile. Why? Surely half a gig is enough memory to have all my running processes in memory at the same time, even if they're inactive? According to the task manager I've got 210mb 'free', so everything that's running now should stay running and not get swapped out, but it does. Cheers -- Adrian/Witchy Owner & Webmaster, Binary Dinosaurs www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk - possibly the UK's biggest online computer museum www.snakebiteandblack.co.uk - ex-monthly gothic shenanigans :o(

Thanks, I'd forgotten about sysinternals...... Cheers w

Does Win2K Pro actually *require* you to have that pagefile? I honestly don't know (between 3.1 and XP I didn't use Windows), however, I do know that in WinXP Pro you can turn that pagefile off. I found that with both my wife and I logged in and using the system lightly that could be done with 512Mb, but when I started running heavy memory apps I started to have problems, sinc I've now upgraded the system to 1Gb, and my wife only uses our G5 PowerMac now, I've not had any further problems with having swapping turned off. Now Mac OS X on the other hand seems to have some seriously UGLY swapping (and RAM) requirements (I normally ran Mac OS 9 with swapping turned off), and the system doesn't start feeling usable until you have 768MB RAM or more. Still in spite of this flaw, I'd much rather use our Mac :^) Zane -- -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh(a)aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |

Well, I've been using both MS and non-MS systems for over 10 years each. My statement is based on 1/ the generic demands of any windowing system, which are a compute drag, 2/ the specific history of MS as being a leader in clumsy engineering ("bloatware" and other factors) 3/ the model used at Cray itself, where the compute engine was separated and I/O was given over to an outside processor. John A.

The date of passage is more like 2005-2006. When you consider that the largest compute problems solved anywhere on earth 30 years ago could be solved on any old podunk desktop, it gets a little shocking, and I probably reacted too quickly (and botched the calc.). Still, it's basically next year. Not clear but not far off either. A Cray-1 wasn't exactly a CM-1 in terms of architectural oddity. And agreed Linux Is great and getting more so. John A.

Zane H. Healy wrote: I use wasd on a vax 4000/500 and it's pretty quick, although it's all plain html Dan

On Tuesday 10 February 2004 09:43, Witchy wrote: Do it. I always wanted to put a MicroVAX 3100 into a colo just to see the tech's faces when they asked where to plug the monitor and keyboard in :) alex/melt

I rescued a few nice bits at the recycle center this weekend, the computer day comes only once a month. at least one is even on topic (stamped1993): NEC UltraLiteVERSA (PC-430-1521), which states 13.5VDC on the label but the power input jack is four pins. Anybody which two to choose? John A.

On Mon, 9 Feb 2004, Eric Dittman wrote: Depends on the hardware, Eric... a 300LX isnt, um, spiffy. --f

On Tue, 10 Feb 2004, Witchy wrote: I was only pointing out to Eric that altho VMS-on-Alpha *can* be quite nice, it largely depends on the system it runs on... yes, it runs *very* nice on my new DS. It runs less nice, but still good, on the CObra (DEC4000-620). It runs, um, period, on a Multia :) Lemme know if I can help. True.. I use *way* too much of that here. --f

True, but he's talking about Apache, MySQL, and I believe PHP. All together, that could be painful. I think the key thing will be ensuring that the system has enough RAM and to try to keep it from swapping. The one good thing about a 3000/300LX is that it takes 72-pin True Parity RAM. I'd recommend maxing it if at all possible. Pentium Pro servers can be a good source of RAM. Zane -- -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh(a)aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |

There's 4 websites on the existing one and I barely shift 2gb per month in page hits...last week I found out that my ISP doesn't bitch until I start shifting a gig a day so I think I'm fine :) I was surprised to find that the UW disk with correct cable, converter and active terminator upset the SCSI bus so I'm temporarily using an old HP Surestore drive that I rescued from an old server at Mrs Witchy's school. 2gb but it's NOISY! Anyone in the UK got a spare RZ29B they don't want any more? :) Installing VMS 7.3 as I type......though I've been spoilt by the fast CD-ROMs in ES40s and the like so installing from an RRD42 is painful to say the least! Having said that I've got an old SCSI Yamaha CDRW that still reads but won't write so I might try putting that in my external CD enclosure...... Cheers -- Adrian/Witchy Owner & Webmaster, Binary Dinosaurs www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk - possibly the UK's biggest online computer museum www.snakebiteandblack.co.uk - ex-monthly gothic shenanigans :o(