Replacement of PFE Workstation and Software

[wrigke]

Hi all,
It appears the motherboard in my PFE Dell T3500 workstation is beginning to fail.  After talking to Dell about options, it seems that the best idea is to replace the workstation rather than the motherboard.  What are the recommended features that a workstation should have to successfully run PFE?

Also, my current workstation runs XP but I will upgrade to Windows 7 in this process.  What is the easiest way to put PFE on the new computer but not have to re-make any configuration files?  I envision downloading a fresh install from the PFE web site and then simply copy over the relevant files from the old system but want to make sure that will work.

Karen

[Probeman]

It appears the motherboard in my PFE Dell T3500 workstation is beginning to fail.  After talking to Dell about options, it seems that the best idea is to replace the workstation rather than the motherboard.  What are the recommended features that a workstation should have to successfully run PFE?

Also, my current workstation runs XP but I will upgrade to Windows 7 in this process.  What is the easiest way to put PFE on the new computer but not have to re-make any configuration files?  I envision downloading a fresh install from the PFE web site and then simply copy over the relevant files from the old system but want to make sure that will work.

Any decent workstation will do. Win 7 64 bit is recommended. Here are some specs I just did for Barb:

8 GB RAM w/ ECC Memory
2 500 GB hard drives (non-raid)
2 (or 3 for JEOL 8X30) network connections
30" monitor w/ Sound Bar
1 GB video RAM
Win7 64 bit
DVD Read/Write

As for installing PFE this post is useful:

http://probesoftware.com/smf/index.php?topic=65.0

PFE won't overwrite existing config files, but you can!

[wrigke]

What is the rationale for 2-500GB hard drives rather than 1TB hard drive?

Karen

[John Donovan]

What is the rationale for 2-500GB hard drives rather than 1TB hard drive?

Two reasons.

One, you can install Norton Ghost and have it backing up always to your second drive. If the main one fails, you can swap, restore and be up and running in 30 min. Yes, this has happened to me several times over the last decade. This isn't a replacement for secure off-site back (which Norton Ghost also supports) but for those computers with networking (e.g., INL), this is better than nothing. Note, this doesn't protect you against a motherboard failure, but at least the data on the drives is still intact!  The alternative is RAID drive arrays.

Two, some people like to have their data stored on a separate drive and then you can do that easily. Might have some speed benefits for large images.

For these and some other reasons I always install a 2nd drive on any new computer (e.g., from a vendor), and install Ghost for backup.

[John Donovan]

Just FYI: here is a document that might help decide which computer to buy for running Probe for EPMA.  The exact computer model/config is not critical, but a large monitor and lots of video memory helps.