Topic: Wx computer

[offroadjosh]

Do you use a strict Wx computer for all your station uploads and data? Or do you just use your general use computer?..



Josh

[Axelvold]

I have a PC that is dedicated to the weather station, and everything around it.

webserver, webcams (4), VWS, WUHU, VWSql, FWI Calculator (v.4.1)

(AMD Athlon 64x2 Dual Core Processor 6000+ 3,0Ghz, 300Gb hdd, 2gb Ram), and a 5Gb hdd for backup

[killwilly]

I have an old XP Acer laptop that I use just for the WX. I use my new laptop for every day use.

Alan.

[TorH]

I use a dedicated PC here for my WX. It's a Dell Dimension 8300 Intel 2,8 GHz, 80GB+400GB HD, 1GB Ram, windows XP Professional.
The webcam run on it's one as it is a networkcamera with it's own webserver 

That's my "retiered user PC" i use for WX, a great five year old buddy 

[port1]

I have a dedicated PC for my Wx.
It's a stand-alone, not used for e-mail or anything else.
Strictly for VWS p73.

Henry

[racenet]

Actually, have several machines dedicated to the weather. 



Bob

[Anthony]

I have a deticated computer for VWS. I have another general use computer that uploads my weather warnings & watches. And it also uploads my lightning data. Some day I hope to have one computer to handle it all.

[Hitbylightning]

I'm another one using an old PC as a dedicated wx computer. Have all my wx software on it.  I run wx sim on my laptop though as I have some problems with it on the wx pc - something to do with .net
I use a separate PC for my webcam - this pc has become a media PC, as I have all my music on it, as well as photos and video.  Run a 1TB external drive for backup purposes - and the one thing to grab in the event we have to get out of the house quickly.  Unfortunately this PC is playing up at the moment, I think it's an issue with the graphics card.

[d_l]

I use an NSLU2 Meteohub for the WU and website uploads, a Panasonic network cam uploads its shots of the sky, and my laptop handles the NOAA daily and yearly summary uploads from WL in the early morning and evening.

[Downlinerz2]

   I am the oddball out here .  I use my regular "everyday" desktop for my weather station. Thinking of adding a second monitor though.

[weathergirl]

I use my computer for everything as well

[sam2004gp]

I use a dedicated Pentium II 300 MHZ machine for VWS, web uploads, and my webcam.  The whole setup only pulls about 50 watts when the LCD monitor is off.  Virtually no fan noise as well.
http://www.mountcrawfordweather.org/about.html

[SLOweather]

Last weekend I completed cutting over from my older weather/home automation/etc computer to a new XP Pro Dell Optiplex 755 N series with a Quad-core processor and 4 GB RAM. Quieter, too...

[offroadjosh]

I use my computer for all around(not much longer i am learning to build a computer).



Josh

[JOE]

I started out to use a computer for WX only, but have slowly added this and that to it, so it's not too dedicated anymore.

I do, however, have a laptop for more general computing tasks.

My BIGGEST problem is getting and keeping my computers talking to each other.  The new(er) laptop is running Vista and that seems to create problems with simple file and print sharing.  Does for me anyway.

The computer I use for WX has a couple hard drives plus an external along with my printers, and I always seem to have trouble getting the Vista laptop to see the WX computer.

[offroadjosh]

I started out to use a computer for WX only, but have slowly added this and that to it, so it's not too dedicated anymore.

I do, however, have a laptop for more general computing tasks.

My BIGGEST problem is getting and keeping my computers talking to each other.  The new(er) laptop is running Vista and that seems to create problems with simple file and print sharing.  Does for me anyway.

The computer I use for WX has a couple hard drives plus an external along with my printers, and I always seem to have trouble getting the Vista laptop to see the WX computer.

having the same problem here!! vista laptop cannot see XP computer. Have you gotten it to somewhat work?


Josh

[JOE]

Depends what day it is and how I'm sitting in the chair.

It says to contact my system administrator, but standing in front of a mirror talking to myself is worthless for tech support.

having the same problem here!! vista laptop cannot see XP computer. Have you gotten it to somewhat work?


Josh

[offroadjosh]

Oh well so i guess its not just my lack of computer skills not being able to get it to work. haha


Josh

[Jiles111]

There is a way to hard code you Vista computer to see the other one.
Just open up
c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts       (There is no file ext by default)
Open it with notepad
Under the listing for

127.0.0.1 localhost
Type in the IP address of the other computer with its name. Like

192.168.1.101 computer2
192.168.1.102 computer3

Then just hit the X to close notepad. It will ask you to save it. If you do not do it this way, Notepad will want you to save it with a .txt extension. It will not work with any extensions.

Now on the XP machine.. Do the same.

Do you have XP Pro, Vista anything other than basic or home? If so you can enable remote administration of the hard drives. XP home and Vista home does not allow this. There is a trick to turn it on (If you have the Pro versions or better).

A few tips on networking. Make sure both computers are in the same workgroup. To see what workgroup you are in, just right click on the "My Computer" icon, Click Properties, then goto the tab "Computer Name", and you will see your computer name and workgroup.

Make sure you have the same user and password on both computers.

Hope this helps!

[wxtech]

My 'main' computer runs 24/7.  It is a 7 year old HP Pavilion 950 with XP Pro.  For me, weather is in the 'General use' category.  Special applications are circuit design and data acquisition.  This computer does everything very well.  I use it for general use, Outlook, VWS, ImageSalsa, CAD/PCB design Spider Solitaire, large format/double sided printing on a CP1700. 
My laptop is a Compaq Vista Home for word processing etc.  A desktop Compaq Vista is used for spare whatever & music.  My TiePie Oscilloscope/multimeter needs Windows 2000 or earlier for compatibility, so a Toshiba Satellite is dedicated to this job.

[UpstateWeather.com]

I have a really nice laptop that is my general / every day computer. Didn't want to keep her on 24/7, so I bought a dedicated WX computer / server. Nothing special (very cheap) but it gets the job done.

[ryan hothersall]

I have a separate computer for the weather station.

When I bought it it was a standard office computer, but I have souped it up a bit by stuffing as much RAM as I could into it and replacing the tiny 80GB hard drive with a 1 TB one.

As well as running weatherlink, I also use it to listen to the internet radio and storing all those little bits and pieces that you don't want to get rid of.

While my main computer is used for the net, email, flight simulator (don't get me started on how much money I have spent trying to get that to run smoothly) plus etditing photos and videos.

[Chris H.]

I'm hoping to buy a small case, fit a good motherboard and CPU into it and run one or two large-capacity HDD's in it, and plug in my weather camera into it and use Wheresjames WebCam publisher 24/7 that way my 550w Windows XP MCE computer won't have to be put in hibernate every night while I'm asleep, or kept on all day when no one is home. I wonder if one of the major PC companies make one that uses very little electricity. I'd use a Mac Mini but I don't think my Logitech webcam is compatible with a Mac, especially with Apple's new Mac OS X Snow Leopard. I wonder if Dell's Mac Mini competitor would do the job? I don't want to spend a huge amount of money!! 

[GVaughn]

My WX setup involves 4 computers:
1.  A very old Gateway P3-800 with 500 MB Ram - XP-Pro.
    This machine handles the interface to the WMR968 (to VWS).
    It has 2 constantly running processes: the first to gather data from VWS and
    send it to MySQL (on computer #2), the second to create graphs in
    BMP format on a Linux box (my web server).  These processes update
    once every minute.
2.  Compaq Presario 3400+ with an AMD Semipron processor (single core)
    and 1 GB ram.
    This machine is the MySQL server running windows XP Pro.  The only
    other processing is an internet OTR stream being downloaded.
3.  Another very old Gateway p3-800 running Linux as a web server.
4.  A Gateway DX4200-90 64 bit with quad cores and 4 GB ram - runs Vista 64bit Premium.
    This is my "main" computer and is what I use for all that I do.
    It also runs a couple of processes to create historic graphs (one
    per day for each of the variables - temp, humid, wind, rain and
    pressure).  The graphs are created on the Linux box in BMP format -
    they are then converted to JPG by Linux.  It also creates web pages
    on the Linux box to display the graphs.

So far I only have data since August 7Th.  New web pages and graphs are
created for each new date and they arrive.  If you want to see what the
graphs are like they are at: http://www.dawiz.net/weather.html - the
historic graphs are accessible from a link on that page or go to
http://www.dawiz.net/weather/test.html

[SLOweather]

I clicked Wx Computer because it's closer than General to what I do.

I have a Dell Quad-Core Optiplex N Series with 3 GB RAM, XP Pro, and a Sunix 8-Port serial card that runs all the weather stuff including the Boltek card and NexStorm, plus HomeSeer for home automation, the Brultech energy monitor connection and tenholder software, and other 24/7 apps like the telemetry monitoring software for our water company.

Between real and virtual ports, it has 21 serial ports. I've had to request a couple of software authors to add higher COM port # capability to their programs because I just couldn't shuffle the ports around enough to get everything connected.