Sorry I have been away on holiday. You can put me down as in favour. I would like something for accessing the internet for research. Design wise I use CS4 at home and a few other free programmes. If available I would use a PC at the space for viewing and altering files and designing new stuff. Macs confuse the shit out of me.
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We actually already have nine computers in Makerspace, one is setup in the clean room, the others are pending the areas to be finished, and there’s also one on the laser cutter.
Can I use any of them then?
Sure, there is one on the table in the clean area
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is one of these allocated for the sewing area?
If you’d like
bump 
What are we buying this for?
Really think we should wait on this one…
There is no point rushing into buying a computer when we have so many and no one has yet said what they can’t do that we need this for, and we’ve still not even agreed to buy Adobe Illustrator where this all started from…
Everyone’s gotten all excited as usual about an idea, but there are 9 computers in Makerspace, the laser cutter one is a decent machine, the others are average. I don’t get what we need another one for.
I agree. I’m ready to buy a new one if there’s a need, but if we have 9 computers hanging around doing nothing, I’d rather see one put into use than add to the pile. If it needs some more RAM or whatever, that’s fine.
The plan when I have time is to investigate smooshing the computers into less computers with more better bits.
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What’s the age / spec of those computers? 1 fast computer would be good, if we can pimp one up a bit that sounds like a good plan.
The last message from director @tomnewsom was that he was going to make this order, and I saw nothing to the contrary since so I was just chasing.
I didn’t know we had so many machines already in the space, so I’m holding off until we know for sure that one of them (or a combination of their components smooshed into one PC) won’t fill the need.
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This thread has gone massively off topic, the original idea based on Pauls response to me was to provide a cheap mid range computer for general purpose activities, however that now seems to have spiralled for a couple of us into a high end CAD workstation, and it’s not clear what the various voices of support are voicing support for, and it also doesn’t seem clear still if there is a need to provide computers more powerful than basic photo editing, CAD and illustrator work.
We’ve got :
8x Core 2 Duo
1x Xeon
Core 2 Duo
There are 8x Intel Core 2 Duo machines of decent enough spec to run Windows 10, browse online, play videos, word process and do CAD wireframe/drawing. With more RAM they’d be better off, and SSD wouldn’t hurt either. They could be upgraded for under £100 I would guess.
They struggle would struggle with rendering shaded CAD stuff and doing more advanced stuff.
Xeon
There is one machine used for the laser cutter that is more powerful, it’s more of a workstation machine.
I’d suggest setting the Xeon up as a workstation (fill it with RAM) and moving one of the others onto the laser cutter - surely it doesn’t need to be hugely powerful to run 2D CAD?
Then see how it goes.
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Sounds good to me.
The OP:
@Beth said this would be of use to her, I will stop taking my laptop to work soon so won’t have a machine with me if I stop by on way back from work. @boldaslove you created post, would you use this computer? @StudioNelle is using current machine on large table a fair bit?
Let’s upgrade the Xeon with RAM and SSD, and see how it goes, it’s not really detrimental to try it, worst case scenario - it doesn’t get used that much. These are acceptable losses - its low risk.
Can we get a nice large monitor for it? Nothing crazy, doesn’t have to be 4K, but higher than HD please (hate that this is the standard now, is actually quite a low resolution these days).
@RichM That thought crossed my mind too, I can’t come to Makerspace due to illness at the moment, but I will look into it, a smaller chassis would be nicer.
@pip Yeah thats why I think it got confused, it started off with that, but then the reaction later was different…
Regardless I agree the Xeon would should be upgraded as described depending on cost, I think it might have been ECC memory so it would be too expensive…
A decent monitor would be nice also, would @tomnewsom look into this, I think it is a DVI output on that machine, but lets hold off until we can test JobControl and Illustrator on a Core 2 Duo machine.
1440p is a good compromise and is pretty affordable these days. I’m tempted by one myself.
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I have a monitor like this at work:
http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/dell-up2516d-monitor?c=uk&cs=ukbsdt1&l=en&s=bsd
Only issue I have is that that these monitors are Low DPI, I’ve been spoiled by Apple Retina displays.
The Dell T5400 computer that is used with the lasercutter already has an SSD, possibly 80GB.
Yes, it uses ECC RAM, it had 16GB but due to concrete dust corroding the contacts it only has 8GB now.
There is a chance that unused RAM sockets on it will be troublesome.
The same model of computer can be purchased for under £100 on ebay (without monitor), a bit more if you want 8 cpu cores instead of 4 but that would increase the electricity bill for no benefit to the workloads we are likely to put on one.
If you want to upgrade that one, the cost of getting one of the same model that hasn’t been filled with concrete dust is not much extra.
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Mmmmmm:
http://www.novatech.co.uk/pc/range/novatechnti227workstation.html
Brand new. Warranty. PowerFul. Finance option.