G400TV system for classroom??

[Aspring]

I posted earlier about my wife wanting a lower end nle system for her classroom. Does the following seem reasonable?

Matrox G400TV 32MB dual head
Pentium III 600Mhz EB
256 MB PC100 SDRAM
ASUS P3C2000 motherboard
Boot Drive Maxtor 30Gb 7200rpm (will have many programs on it)
AV Drive Maxtor 30GB 7200rpm
Soundblaster Live MP3+
100MB Zip (school standard, have to have)
CDR/RW HP 9100 (for video storage)
DVD - Hitachi - 8x IDE (uses anime in class)
Full tower case
Win 98SE

Thanks for help.

[Damien]

I think you got the video card mixed up.
For video you will need the Marvel G400-16MB
or the G400-32MB with Rainbowrunner G-Series.
The rest of you configuration sounds good.

[Rick6612]

Hi Aspring,

With all the problems people have had with SB Live! cards, I personally would be afraid to buy one...

Also, you probably don't really need 256MB of RAM, if you're concerned about cost.

Rick

[Dayspring]

Hi there!

You know what...? That's a better 'lower end' NLE system than a lot of people use for commercial applications, so I think you'll be fine.

Those two Maxtor drives are the new Ultra ATA66 drives, right...? I'm not familiar with the motherboard, but you wouldn't do yourself a disservice by making sure that it supports Ultra66...

The only thing I see that might be overkill is the 256 Meg of RAM. Seriously, I should imagine it will be rare to ever work a project that will require that much RAM. But if you have no problem with the extra expense, why not... <shrug>. Just don't go below 128 Megs, I would say...

As for the sound card, well, I don't have any experience with the SB Live, so I couldn't comment except to say that I haven't seen nearly so many problems with it since some of the drivers and hardware has been updated, so you might run with it just fine. PCI sound cards just seem to take up a LOT of PCI bandwidth, so you might consider finding a really good ISA one, as your Mobo ought to have at least one shared ISA slot...

Oh and one personal preference. I don't like Win98 SE. At all. I have a system running Win98 (actually Win98lite, which is a Win98 core running the Win95 explorer, it's MUCH more stable, and really, really speedy, anyway... a little plug for one of my favorite free products [<A HREF="http://www.98lite.com/">www.98lite.com</A>] ). You can use the old edition of Win98 and get most of the improvements offered by Win98 SE by downloading the critical updates from Microsoft, and you'll still have a much more stable system. The shutdown bug is driving a bunch of my friends mad with the fact that their machines rarely, if ever want to shut down properly, even with the patch offered by MS. But of course, operating system is completely your call. I'll get off my soapbox now.

Matt

[Aspring]

Thanks for the input, folks. I've ordered the system with a couple of modifications. It should be ready Tuesday. I have no choice about the SE version of Win98. The Marvel Card memory number was a typo by the system configurator. I should have caught it.

I'll wait for awhile to see how the RT2000 works out in real life before getting the higher end nle system we were also going to buy, but we will need digital input soon. If any of you have ideas about system configuration and experience with the RT2000, I'd love to see you post.

Thanks again,

Aspring