Bill, Why "Good luck wth a serial port"? You can get new HP Business desktops with a serial port... ... some times its "optional" but they are about.. HP http://store.hp.com/us/en/pdp/desktops/hp-prodesk-400-g3-microtower-pc-p-p0d... Lenovo http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/desktops/thinkcentre/m-series-sff/m900-sff/#tab... Dell http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/optiplex-xe2/pd?oc=soxem57p97&model_id=opt... Dave Wade G4UGM
-----Original Message----- From: vcf-midatlantic [mailto:vcf-midatlantic- bounces@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org] On Behalf Of William Dudley via vcf-midatlantic Sent: 05 February 2016 15:06 To: vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> Cc: William Dudley <wfdudley@gmail.com> Subject: Re: [vcf-midatlantic] So, we're going to need an office computer.
Evan,
Good luck on the serial port.
More likely, get a serial to USB adapter and use that for your serial port requirement.
And why Winders at all? Microsoft is shoving Win 10 down everybody's throat, the maker of the FTDI driver for the usb to serial chip is screwing around with the driver and breaking FTDI clone adapters. What application that runs only on Winders is driving this requirement?
Bill Dudley
On 2/5/2016 12:26 AM, Evan Koblentz via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
We're going to need a computer for the new museum's office/workbench area.
Requirements:
1. It must have a very small footprint. A full tower, anything rack-mounted, servers, etc. are not suitable for our current situation. Ideally a "mini" case (ha! a minicomputer...) would serve us well.
2. We don't need a laptop and would rather have a desktop anyhow, so we can more easily upgrade it and avoid proprietary stuff.
3. Its motherboard should have a sufficient CPU and enough RAM capacity to run a modern operating system.
4. Serial port. :)
5. We'll need this in the next few weeks.
That's about it. I figure we can buy a cheap SSD, install Windows 7 SP1 -- which is the least-worst version of Windows -- and make it dual-boot into Linux. I can do all of that myself, but it would certainly save time if the system gets to us already configured this way.
I have a spare USB keyboard/mouse to donate. VCF owns a few small-ish square LCDs, but we could definitely use a donation of a modern wide-screen LCD -- perhaps a 22-inch or around that size.