Hi All
I am looking to purchase Wxsim and put it on my weather station PC which runs WD. In addition I am looking at getting a Boltek stormtracker or LD250 and running Nexstorm in addition.
As it stands the current PC is pretty much at top capacity so a replacement is needed. I am thinking of rolling PC’s down so the replacement would be an Dell Optiflex with 2GB ram and AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core 4800+ running Windows XP. Hard disk size is not an issue!
Does anyone have an opinion as to whether this PC will be beefy enough for all three pieces of sw, but specifically Wxsim as this is unknown?
Comments welcome.
Cheers
Jon
That is pretty much what my PC (I have 3GB Ram) is although I don’t run a Boltek or associated S/W, but I do have one logitech camera and another image across the LAN with all day videos etc being made. I also use it for internet browsing and some YouTube vids too. Even watching them while wxsim is running doesn’t seem to affect the data received for the weather station or the wxsim calcs that run for about 3 minutes. The PC runs from about 1-2% up to 21% normally and a bit higher with wxsim. The latest WD is much lower demand on the cpu. I am sure that spec PC will be happy with your demands and more. 
Graeme
Me too.
I don’t run a Boltek, but I have WD and WXSIM running on a computer with much less power than what you have in mind (a Fit-PC with 500MHz AMD Geode LX800 processor and 512MB of RAM). A WXSIM forecast pushes the processor up to 100% for 5 minutes or more (up to 15 minutes in very complex weather), but WD keeps going just fine while that is going on.
I run a single core AMD Athlon 2700 with 4GB of RAM and a 1GB graphics card.
On this I run WD, WXSim, Boltek PCI with Nexstorm & NSLog, 2 webcams, AIS receiver, USB GPS receiver for StrikeStar uploads, WASP2 (an add-on for Nexstorm), Digital Atmosphere and a couple of small uploader programs.
It normally runs at 30-40% CPU, increasing to 100% when WXSim runs but the RAM usage remains at 40%.
I’m considering upgrading to a tri or quad core processor but the one I have now handles everything OK and I don’t get any unexpected blue screens or lockups.
I’ve got a spare tower case so I’ll go for a motherboard bundle and new hard drives if I do go for an upgrade. I built my main graphics & internet PC myself and that was faster & easier than I though it would be + it was cheaper than buying a ready-made. 