In article ,
Lee Michaels wrote:

"Gary Heston" wrote
[ ... ]

Another poster mentioned using ECC memory; that will also improve
stability,
but it adds to cost. It's usually found in servers rather than PCs, so
expect to spend $300+ for a motherboard, for example.


I will look into that. The problem with the server boards I have had in the
past, they don't run a lot of monitors. I have need for lots of monitors.
The big limit to the monitors I can run in this freezing and slowing
behavior when the data increases beyond a certain point.

How many monitors do you need? Most of our workstations are dual monitor
with the GeForce 8800GTs... Perhaps you would benefit more with a better
video adapter (or two) to offload the main CPU a bit.

I've been building systems at work recently with dual quad-core Intel Xeon
CPUs, SuperMicro X7DAL motherboards, 12GB of memory, and GeForce 8800GT
video cards, dual booting between Windows XP and RedHat Linux. Also built
some similar ones with 2GB and no fancy video in 1U rack cases (one of
them at 100% CPU puts out less heat than a dual 3.2GHz Xeon while doing
4x the work) for computation servers running Fedora 7. The users like
them quite a bit, and I haven't heard of any stability issues.


Sounds like my kind of machine! I been hearing about the 64 bit windows
seven. The memory constraints of older operating systems will be gone. I
am certain that a lot of my problems would go away with enough memory.

There is a 64-bit version of Windows XP currently available. You might also
consider Windows Server 2003; it might prove more stable for you.

There are also 64-bit versions of several Linux distributions, including
RedHat, if your apps are available for it.

However, whether Windows or Linux, your application would have to be
compiled for 64-bit to take advantage of the OS.


Gary

--
Gary Heston http://www.thebreastcancersite.com/

Why is it that these days, the words "What idiot" are so frequently
followed by the words "at Microsoft"?