chromatograms? what kind of chromatograms?
I regret not getting to this thread sooner. We do have lab equipment
connected to PC's that use older interfaces.
There is an old Dell Inspiron 7000 (366MHz, 256mb RAM) running WinXP
connected to a Sartorius SC2. We used this old laptop while new Dells don't
come with rs232 ports. 
We also have a couple of Pentium IV machines with equipment connected via
ISA-slot GPIB cards. These also run WinXP, but one has 512mb RAM and
another has 1GB. All of these have far more RAM than they need for what
they do, but they have never had access to the internet, never had any
Windows updates, and aren't as bloated as typical office or personal
computers as a result of that. We even had to call in our registrations for
the Windows software just to avoid the risk of plugging into an ethernet
port to register.


Orchid XP v7 wrote:

> scott wrote:
>>> No. Our normal *lab* environment. ;-) The *office* just runs Word and
>>> Access. (And the guys in the lab insist on using Excel a lot...)
>> 
>> And I expect the guys in the office often want to include fancy graphics
>> into their Word documents, perhaps just company logos on a letter, or
>> photos/diagrams in a report.
> 
> Not really, no.
> 
> Just chromatagrams. I gather that they're quite large... (Well, the data
> is almost always very noisy.)
> 
>> All of which rapidly use up memory and
>> which would slow down hugely on a very slow machine.
>> 
>> Sure, they could use a plain text editor on an ancient machine with 32K
>> of RAM, but it's not going to look very professional.
> 
> My point is not so much that we should go back to using 32K machines,
> but rather that we should go back to the days of programs only using
> more than 32K if they *need* it for something. ;-)

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