DiyLightAnimation
Fun => The Porch => Topic started by: winwin on December 29, 2012,
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This year I was running my lights with my laptop but I need to come up with something different next year (I need my laptop!).
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?
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large channel count with usb dongle... maybe...
with eD, it should be fine.
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Hey Bernard, As long as you are staying with a small channel count (under 200). It would probably be fine. I probably throw away better computers than yours as I inherit a lot of old computers after I help customers convert to a new machine or replace broken ones. We should talk about this next fall and see what I have in my stack that will be going to the electronics recycle place at that time. Mark your calendar and call me around Sept 1, 2013. There are nine computers sitting here now in various stages of assembly. Some have a bad hard drive, some a bad motherboard, others just old. I'm about to retire the computer I was using for my show last year that had about 3200 channels. I get out of memory errors this year when I went to over 7000 channels. Call me after the first of the year if you want to look at that one.
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i use a core 2 duo 3Ghz computer with 4GB ram. I run the "show computer" inside a virtualbox running Windows XP with 1GB of RAM
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I do not plan on running lots of channels. This year I had 32. Next year, my plan is to double that, maybe will go to 80 channels (5 LEs) but I doubt it will be more. All incandescent (or LED), no RGBs. I have an USB dongle but not the eD.
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That should be more than plenty in xlights and that channel count. I ran my Halloween show (~1500 channels) on a P4 (2.4) with 1GB and CPU usage was maybe 2%, it didn't even sweat at all.
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I ran my show on a netbook (p3 I think). Pretty low powered. I had 1700 channels.
Kurt
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Thanks for the responses. I did not think I needed something powerful and I thought that old PC would be OK. Based on what you tell me, it probably would work just fine. I am going to try to "resurrect" it if I can replace the power supply which I know is dead.
Jim, I definitely would like to have a look at your unit you will retire. I'll contact you when I am back in GA.
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OK so let me get this straight, having IBM install a Deep Blue system in my basement was totally unnecessary? My wife is going to kill me... b <yk..
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Caretaker that was 90s tec you need the ibm watson
I did some hunting and found this http://superuser.com/questions/250070/have-todays-desktop-pcs-surpassed-ibms-deep-blue-of-1997
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Wondered why I got it so cheap... <fp.
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what about my AS/400? hehe
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I was wondering why Apple doesn't support my Apple II+ (with a whopping 16K of RAM!) Maybe it is time to upgrade. My Sinclair and my TSR-80 Model 1 are doing great (although my Heathkit died on me already).
Anyone wanna have a go at the PDP-11 (I kinda miss writing interrupt service routines in octal!)
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My Atari 800XL runs lsp just fine!
Sent from my Thunderbolt using Tapatalk 2.
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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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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!
Glad to see that it is working fine for you. My system would not be much different than yours, although I was thinking to update it with sp3 but you are right, it won't help for a stand alone pc dedicated to the lights.
I just need to put my hands on a replacement for the power supply.
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Oh, I forgot to say that my show has between 130 and 140 DMX channels, if it makes a difference.