Equipment and Testing Facilities

Authoring Machine:

Pentium III 1000 on an Asus P3B-F with Windows 2000 Professional

This is an Intel BX440 system, not super-fast but still the most stable and reliable chipset ever made, with 512MB of top-grade Infineon RAM. This system is sacrosanct — no test software or shareware is ever installed here and all data files are regularly backed up to another hard drive on a separate machine.

Testing and Development Machines:

Dual Athlon MP 2100+ on Tyan Tiger (AMD 760MPX chipset)

This system, which also features 1GB of registered memory, a Matrox G550 video card with two Iiyama monitors and a Pioneer A04 DVD burner, is used as a system server and for testing high-end video editing and multimedia applications.

Athlon XP 2600+ on an Asus A7V8X-X (VIA KT400 chipset)

This system is for testing programs on a faster, more advanced single-processor Athlon platform. It's currently equipped with 512MB of DDR PC400 memory and an Nvidia FX5200 graphics card. In addition to testing I also use this system for running Linux. Among other things I have a copy of my online forum set up here with Apache and PHP, which I use for testing updates and modifications to the forum software before committing them online.

Pentium III 550 on an Asus P2B (Intel BX440 chipset)

This system is one of the most reliably compatible configurations ever built. It's configured so that I can be pretty sure that anything that doesn't work here is a software rather than a hardware problem. Fitted with a TNT2 graphics card from Diamond. Among other things this machine also enables me to test the viability of modern applications on slower machinery.

Pentium III 933 on an Asus P3V4X (VIA Apollo 133a chipset)

This system allows for testing on a VIA chipset using the VIA 4in1 system drivers, which sometimes still respond differently to the Intel chipsets. Fitted with a GeForce 2 GTS graphics card from Asus and an SBLive! sound card, which is also good for surprises sometimes.

AMD K6/550 on a DFI Socket7 board (VIA Socket7 chipset)

This system enables me to perform tests on a much older and much less powerful computer. Fitted with an Asus graphics card with the Banshee chip.

Other Facilities:

All the systems are fully networked with DSL online access via the network and an SMC hardware router with a hardware firewall. All computers are fitted with hard drive caddies for quick operating system changes. Clean, up-to-date installations of all current Windows versions (95, 98, SE, Me, NT4, 2000, XP Home, XP Pro) are available as images that can be installed on caddy drives in minutes for testing. A wide range of other internal and external peripherals are on hand, or can be obtained and installed at short notice.

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