Proposal: general purpose PC in the front

Discussion
1

The frankenputer PC is not in a usable state.
It’s 15year old 20GB seagate harddrive has extremely slow read performance.
Also it’s a 900MHz althlon with 640MB RAM running XP service pack 2.

I propose to reallocate it’s deskspace for a much nicer windows 7 machine to be permanently set up.

People do sometimes want to quickly look at a website to show someone something on thingverse, check train times or sign up as a member.

The laser cutter PC could then be mostly single purpose.

Objections? Alternative plans?

2

I’m all in favour, if you’ve sourced a suitable machine

3

Seconded!

Is that how it works?

4

Decision made, unless anyone has a better plan.

Open to offers of anything better than a quad-core E5450 with 16GB RAM, otherwise I will bring haul it to the arch in the next few days.

5

That’s a nice machine. Should be capable of much more than a bit of browsing :slight_smile:

6

Even has serial and parallel ports for ancient printers.

2 Likes
7

Unfortunately, the ancient printers need XP. But with a Xeon and 16GB, we may as well run a VM.

8

Sounds great. I doubt we will get a better offer.

9

Maybe we could switch the laser cutter machine with this.

10

The PC controlling the cutter is fine, isn’t it?

Adam’s one sounds like it could stand in as our ‘workstation’?

11

Might be good to have both in action as then it would allow both ‘activities’ to run at the same time

12

I meant for web browsing you don’t need a fast machine but Corel Draw is incredibly slow as is Inkscape on the Laser Cutter machine.

13

Isn’t it better to leave the PC attached to the laser cutter just for printing?

If someone’s sat on it designing then no one can cut.

Or is the issue that we load projects into Inkscape first before sending to print?

14

Ideally I’d say design on the fast PC, print to the laser cutter PC that shares the laser cutter on the network as a printer.

15

The point isn’t about having a fast machine and this same argument goes for illustrator, it’s about needing to be able to send files from the software… If you design something in Inkscape, Corel or Illustrator then you want to be able to send it from the native software otherwise you end up with all sorts of headaches trying to get it right.

The laser cutter computer is horrendously slow for opening inkscape and corel draw as I already said, JobControl struggles too, it’s just way under powered for what it is doing, it should have a fast machine as was stated by Trotec when they gave us the laser.

16

I agree. The laser PC isn’t just for “print and forget”, it’s also for trial-and-error cutting, redesigning and cutting again. It needs to be able to cope with large files. I won’t be able to run the full bed jobs for my London map project on it without a lot of swearing.