Optimal PC Specs for Logos 4

Something roughly equivalent to HAL (from 2001 A Space Odyssey) without the sociopathic homicidal tendencies.  [:p]

Robert, thanks! I needed that laugh.

TC - have you considered picking up Eboostr? The XP equivalent of readyboost for vista/w7? Plug in a four gig usb drive and you'll get a nice increase in speed since you won't have to use your hard drive for a pagefile.

Mike

I'll look into eboostr Mike, I haven't looked into it before. 

I may not go there since my laptop in use is a headless (broken screen) model that is here for beta and hacking anyway.  :-)  I'll be using it for Linux /Logos4 testing soon.

Ready boost is no substitute for more RAM though; the disadvantage of using flash memory for your pagefile are 1) slower write speeds and 2) it will kill your flash memory. (Flash memory has a limited number of cycles of being erased and rewritten, I think most are rated to 100,000 which means you'll never run into trouble carrying around your documents but probably would if it's being written over and over again like as a pagefile is...)

An additional problem with setting your pagefile onto a USB key as a workaround for XP is that for sequential reading (ie large file, all in one spot), a hard disk is actually much quicker than flash, flash is useful if you've got lots of small bits of data that take a HD a long time to read because of the seek time for each one. ReadyBoost apparently accounts for this and doesn't use the flash memory for large files, I've never used Eboostr...

It depends a bit on what else you want to do with it - if you're not gaming seriously, don't worry about about the graphics card, a cheap graphics card is perfectly adequate for everything else. I presume L2/L3 you're referring to Level 2, Level 3 cache which is not as simple as 3 is better than 2, you could have a look at this, but I wouldn't bother with this really, the cache size and configuration are important but the numbers are meaningless unless comparing chips that are otherwise identical; if you want to compare processors compare how they perform. Quad core will dramatically speed up your indexing time but probably won't make a massive difference for normal running unless you're doing other stuff in the background.

In general more RAM is better and makes a big difference if you run a few program simultaneously. Faster memory gets much more expensive very quickly and probably isn't as good as quantity; eg 4gb DDR2-1066 better than 2gb DDR3-1333 IMO; (you'll need to make sure you have a 64bit OS if you go 4gb or higher).

I think an under-recognised bottleneck when eg loading programs is often the hard-disk so if you can afford a motherboard with builtin RAID and put two hard-drives in RAID0 you can get a significant improvement to the time things take to load; bigger hard drives are also faster due to higher data density -> faster read times and the difference in price is usually not much more, even if you feel like you don't need that much space...

I wouldn't worry about the power supply. The overheating issue in the laptop is due to inadequate heat dissipation - probably a design floor but possibly some sort of fan/hardware failure. If you haven't altered the hardware and aren't trying to overclock it you'd have grounds for a warranty claim if it's still in warranty.

I figured I post this in private beta since it's way off topic, but I found the right computer for L4...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs

24 SSD's in Raid.  Loads the entire Microsoft Office suite in 0.5 seconds!  What would it do with Logos 4?  Index your entire 10,000 book library in seven minutes?

I want one [:|]

Pretty much everything listed there is available on the market.  A year ago that would have cost about $3800 to build.  Probably a bit closer to $3000 now. 

amazing.