[simpits-tech] Windows Questions

[Gene Buckle]

>
> It so happens that I've chanced upon an offer to get a 2.4GHz Athlon MP
> dual-proc machine, with 3GB Ram and all sorts of other goodies, for
> quite cheap. A friend of a friend is a grad student at a university that
> is upgrading a beowulf cluster, so they're getting rid of the old ones.
> Anyway, in order to take advantage of the dual processors I'm gonna make
> the move up to XP (boo! hiss! I know. But that's the wind of change for
> ya...)(PS: As soon as I get more hard drive space I will be dual booting
> with *nix). But I don't have gobs of money to spend on it at the moment
> (it all went to the computer), so I'm wondering two things:
>
Lucky bastard.  I want one! :)

> A) What's the situation with XP Home? Good? Bad? Ugly? Can it handle the
> system specs?

Don't bother with Home on an SMP box.  Use WinXP Pro or Windows 2000.

B) Until I get XP, can 98 handle this machine? I know it
> won't take advantage of the 2nd processor or the 3GB RAM, but will it be
> able to run?

I think Win98 may have problems with memory sizes greater than 512MB, but
I could be wrong.

g.