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Re: IDV System Requirements

Tay,

It's great you want to use the IDV in your middle school science
classes.

Your questions are good and touch on a matter other college faculty run
into. They may have labs of older computers they cannot easily replace.
Your computers are better than some our users have!

Good thing you wrote now since the newest IDV should be out in one week.
We are already getting a lot of interest and use from research labs in
the US and Europe.

Actually this version is no more demanding than before, in fact it is
much more efficient. There is only one version of the IDV at a time, and
the new one is the best in terms of performance and reduced memory use.

We have a better idea of what makes it run fast, so we wrote the system
requirements to that level. Some of our users are acustomed to fast
special-built meteorology display systems, so we wrote the system
requirements for them.

Memory is much more important than speed.  512 MB is probably ok, (even
with Windows taking up half of that before you run anything).  256 MB
total on a computer will limit you to a few displays at a time, I think,
but will work somewhat.

The IDV ought to run on either of your computers.  Boosting the 900 MZ
computer to 512 MB of memory would do fine and I recommend you do that,
or use the laptop.

I am developing the IDV on a 3-year old 500 MZ computer with 1 Gigabytes
of memory, and Linux.

I think you will find the newest IDV faster and easier to use, with more
data sources including climate data.

You could just point either of your computers at our Web Start
installation page and see how it works! If it goes well it is very easy.
Installing the IDV is not supposed to be a long or complex effort.
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/projects/metapps/idv_help/IDV_starting.html
(that may move in a week or so)

Cheers,

Stu Wier


> 
> The situation is this...
> 
> The computer I'd most likely use, the one in the computer lab
> connected to the projector, has a 900 MHz processor with 256 MB
> of RAM (which he says could be improved to 512 MB if that would
> be worthwhile).  Alternatively, it could be installed on the
> laptop which has a 1 GHz processor and I think he said 512 MB of
> RAM.
> 
> I take it from the System Requirements descriptions that with
> such limited memory we would have a lot of problems with things
> freezing up, etc.... would the slower processor simply slow
> things down or could it cause other problems too?  Right now,
> Erik is reluctant to put something so demanding on a computer
> that our computer teacher needs for classwork fairly often until
> he knows it will be fairly usable for my needs and yet not make
> it unusable for her.
> 
> So, three questions...
> 
> First, does it make sense to try installing and using it on
> either computer we now have, knowing neither really meets the
> System Requirements?
> 
> Second, and likely a better option from my point of view, is
> there a less demanding version (perhaps an earlier release with
> fewer features) still available for installation?
> 
> Alternatively, can some features of the current release be
> disabled, or simply not installed, to make it less demanding,
> particularly of memory?  (I assume that would require some sort
> of custom installation... is such an option?) For my purposes
> there is no *need* for movies, for example... though it would be
> nice to have them, of course.
> 
> Since our computers are about 2 years old and were considered
> fairly good at the time, I'd guess there must be other users,
> even at the college level, who are running up against the System
> Requirements problem too... am I the only one who's mentioned
> it?
> 

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