The PC running your show.

[tjbrickner]

So for my first year, I have my laptop running my show.  During the day I try and kick out a sequence before I dock my laptop and test for the night.  It a nice machine to build sequences but next year I was thinking about loading my shows on a fixed computer.  My question is how will the hardware affect the show?  The machine I was thinking of using has a pathetic graphics card, but it does have USB 2.0.  Will this work or will my shows suffer any?

[tbone321]

If you shut down the preview then the graphics card means nothing.  What dongle are you using?  If it's the USB dongle, then USB 2.0 is what it is designed to work with.  What are the other specs of this machine?  While you don't need a mega-machine to run a show, you really don't what to use a junker either.  What is important is to have enough memory and a failry fast drive.

[tjbrickner]

It's a P4 (3Ghz) with 1 Gig of RAM and running XP SP3 Lite the hard drive is a WD (don't remember the specs but it's at 7200 RPM)

Have an SSD but won't gain much without going to Win7.  This machine currently runs some insteon devices and that's it.

[winwin]

Funny, this is my story one year later! last year I used my laptop and for this year I grabbed an old PC and plan on running the show with it. P4 with XP SP2. I'll have to check for the RAM but I doubt it is more than  1GB. Preliminary tests are good. We'll see in a few days when all is connected. Worse case, I revert back to my laptop.

 

[winwin]

I have this old 5-6 year old PC collecting cobwebs running on XP with an AMD Athlon XP processor (not sure which one from the entire family) with maybe 500 MB or ram.  I suppose this is good enough to run the show. I am using Xlights and the PC will not be used for anything else, just dedicated to the show.
Will this PC work or do you think it is underpowered?

I run Vixen and XLights on an old laptop with 256 MB of RAM, 1.8 GHz Pentium 4. It has Windows XP SP-2 (SP-3 slows thing down a lot). It's a standalone PC, so it's not like I have to deal with updates to prevent attacks/viruses from the Internet. Heck, I don't even run anti-virus software on it!

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[tbone321]

It's a P4 (3Ghz) with 1 Gig of RAM and running XP SP3 Lite the hard drive is a WD (don't remember the specs but it's at 7200 RPM)

Have an SSD but won't gain much without going to Win7.  This machine currently runs some insteon devices and that's it.

SSD drives are not all rocet fast.  The cheep ones are actually rather slow.  1 Gig of ram is a bit on the light side, especially if you have a big show (large channel count) andlonger songs.  One really easy way to test it is to let this machine run a show this year, perhaps at the end of the season.  I would pick your biggest one and let it run and see if it looks ok.  If it des then you should be good to go for next year.  If not, you can try upping the memory.  I believe that XP is good for 3G.  If it still doesn't work, then you will know in advance that you need a better system, perhaps the Conductor.   

[tjbrickner]

Thanks guys.  Winwin, you'll have to let me know how it goes and I'll give it a shot Tbone.

That's the decision I have to make next year though.  Go for the conductor with the goodies or start on SSC's