Re: Getting around the firewire problem was Re: filmscanners: Best film scanner, period!!!

["Anthony Atkielski" <atkielski.anthony@wanadoo.fr>]

> I'm suggesting you move a few slower applications
> to the new machine and leave the others where they
> are ...

I'd need a new and expensive monitor for both machines, then.  And many
applications are interdependent.  There are many other issues as well.

> PS as 4000dpi scans take a long time to process
> - I hate to think how much time it takes on a
> 200Mhz Pentium Pro.

Not long at all.  The main source of delay is the disk drives, not the processor
or RAM.  Without a RAID array, no disk drive is fast enough to meet the
challenge, so you spend most of your time waiting on disk.

> Since it soumds like you have a decent monitor
> I expect it has both BNC and D-Sub connector ...

Yes, a Sony.

> ... so you could skip the monitor or better still
> get a 15 inch monitor and a dual head Matrox
> graphics card.

Nothing less than 20" and 1600x1200 is acceptable.  A second monitor on one
machine would eat too much memory and processor.

I am limited to PCI Matrox cards, as I do not have AGP support.

> I am sure you can pick up 1GHz+ machine with
> 1GB of memory for less than $1000 ...

Maybe, but I cannot afford to idle my production system for six months while I
reinstall, update, and debug 100 different applications.

You're overlooking the greatest cost here:  The time and money required to
upgrade and reinstall software and return to the same software configuration (or
the equivalent) used on the original machine.