Small network

[Alex]

Hi my local Church have asked if I will revamp their computers over
Christmas....

They have three machines running Win98 networked together with one shared
printer and a shared Internet connection. They currently suffer from the
main machine ( which has a single HDU partitioned into two drives) crashing.

Its mainly Word processing Word, some small spreadsheets and a bit of DTP

They were looking at ramping all machines up to XP with a separate server,
but i think that is a bit over top for their work. I was going to suggest
upgrading machines to XP Pro, ramping up memory to 256Mb on each, and a
separate hard drive in one machine as the shared drive.

Anyone any comments or suggestions

Thanks

Alex

[Bob Willard]

Alex wrote:

> Hi my local Church have asked if I will revamp their computers over
> Christmas....
>
> They have three machines running Win98 networked together with one shared
> printer and a shared Internet connection. They currently suffer from the
> main machine ( which has a single HDU partitioned into two drives) crashing.
>
> Its mainly Word processing Word, some small spreadsheets and a bit of DTP
>
> They were looking at ramping all machines up to XP with a separate server,
> but i think that is a bit over top for their work. I was going to suggest
> upgrading machines to XP Pro, ramping up memory to 256Mb on each, and a
> separate hard drive in one machine as the shared drive.
>
> Anyone any comments or suggestions
>
> Thanks
>
> Alex
>
>

Unless you need the added security (and the added PITA of managing that
added security), I would suggest XP HE instead of XP PRO to save money.

And, 256MB is probably enough for what sounds like Word and light Excel;
you might want to stick 512MB into the most heavily used PC and see if it
feels better to his Wordiness, but 8-to-5 your priest/minister/rabbi/cleric
won't notice the difference. {If you opt to buy a new PC, 512MB would be
a good choice, but I favor minimizing changes to old PCs.}
--
Cheers, Bob

[Alex]

Thanks guys - think of me between Christmas and New Year !!!

Alex

"Bob Willard" > wrote in message
...
> Alex wrote:
>
> > Hi my local Church have asked if I will revamp their computers over
> > Christmas....
> >
> > They have three machines running Win98 networked together with one
shared
> > printer and a shared Internet connection. They currently suffer from
the
> > main machine ( which has a single HDU partitioned into two drives)
crashing.
> >
> > Its mainly Word processing Word, some small spreadsheets and a bit of
DTP
> >
> > They were looking at ramping all machines up to XP with a separate
server,
> > but i think that is a bit over top for their work. I was going to
suggest
> > upgrading machines to XP Pro, ramping up memory to 256Mb on each, and a
> > separate hard drive in one machine as the shared drive.
> >
> > Anyone any comments or suggestions
> >
> > Thanks
> >
> > Alex
> >
> >
>
> Unless you need the added security (and the added PITA of managing that
> added security), I would suggest XP HE instead of XP PRO to save money.
>
> And, 256MB is probably enough for what sounds like Word and light Excel;
> you might want to stick 512MB into the most heavily used PC and see if it
> feels better to his Wordiness, but 8-to-5 your
priest/minister/rabbi/cleric
> won't notice the difference. {If you opt to buy a new PC, 512MB would be
> a good choice, but I favor minimizing changes to old PCs.}
> --
> Cheers, Bob
>