[Imc-tech] about our new computers.

[Sascha Meinrath]

jim sent this to me and i thought i should forward it to our techies.

--sascha

To: Sascha Meinrath <meinrath at students.uiuc.edu>
Subject: about the computers

Sorry I didn't have time to stick around for the meeting. The space looks 
great. Here's a little more info about the computers I've donated to the 
IMC. As I mentioned, I knocked them together and dusted them off for use in 
the Greens office, and they've been taking up space since then, so I hope 
they'll be of service. They're basically ready to plug in and use.

The Mac is a 6100AV with a 66 mhz processor, a 2x CD-ROM, a 2 gig internal 
scsi drive and an external scsi drive that I think is 700 mb or so. There's 
32 mb of RAM. I think it's running OS 8.6. There's also an external 33mbps 
Supra modem with it, and a 14-inch color Mac monitor. This is an old NuBus 
powerPC, without a PCI slot, so there's not much to be done for modernizing 
it. (they do make 'G3-equivalent' add-in boards for NuBus that run up to 
300 mhz, but those don't handle multimedia well). It can be networked with 
the addition of a $30 or so 'AAUI-to-Ethernet transceiver' dongle, which I 
don't have. The "AV" in the name refers to a NuBus card that's in it for 
very basic video digitizing (RCA and S-Video ports) - I don't think any 
software's installed for that (though maybe Mac's basic video player is), 
and in any event I don't think it'll even record audio, so that feature's 
kind of useless. As with any Mac of its vintage, it's got serial and scsi 
ports - no USB or firewire.

The PC is a Pentium 133, also with 32 mb RAM (4 8-mb simms; all slots 
filled) and a 2x or 4x CD-ROM. The drive is about 1.2 gig. It's running 
Win98SE. MS Office 2000 is installed on it, along with Eudora and Netscape, 
so there's only about 700 mb free space. There are a couple free PCI and 
ISA slots; the video and audio cards are very basic ones, the $15 variety 
and kind of old. There's no modem or network card in it, but either could 
be added for just a few bucks. The 15-inch 'Zeos' SVGA monitor is a 
rebranded CTX, I think - again, real basic stuff. If you prefer, this ought 
to run just fine as a Linux machine too, assuming the audio and video cards 
are supported. It's got yer basic serial and parallel ports; it'd be 
possible to add USB or firewire with PCI cards.

These would've been state of the art hardware 5 or 6 years ago - though 
they came to me much later than that via the local student newsgroups. 
They're probably worth about $125-$150 apiece. I think you'll find both of 
these pretty dependable for word processing, web access (either thru a 
modem or thru a high-bandwidth connection if you go for DSL or cable), 
basic databasing, fairly simple Photoshop work, etc. They wouldn't be much 
use as multimedia servers or AV digitizing machines, though, no matter what 
you added to them.

The Epson inkjet printer works with both Macs and PCs; the bad news is that 
print quality is crappy both in black and color. I think both computers 
have drivers for the Epson installed (though the Mac may not, come to think 
of it - they're available on the web if not, or I may have a disk lying 
around). Also, the Mac printer cable should work fine but the PC cable may 
not be bi-directional, so it may not work. If not, I might have another 
better one lying around, as well as 1 or 2 off-brand replacement ink 
cartridges.

Let me know if you have questions.

Jim

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