Agriculture & Middle class Ministry  R&D Administration (DG6)	NATIONAL BOTANIC GARDEN of BELGIUM			National Botanic Garden
	Solutions
	Intro	Tutorials	Informatics

The solutions

• Hardware standardization : easy in the short term, very difficult in the long run because :
• the hardware evolves so quickly, and ...
• we cannot discard all our old PCs for new ones, for evident reasons !
• Remote installation and rescuing (technical info) : the machines are identified by a dedicated server, allowing remote installation and configuration. A dynamic menu allows the end-user to rescue his/her PCs before any OS loading
• DUAL-BOOT PCs for easy Operating System selection.
  

Two OS are provided :
1. Windows-95, because it is ubiquitous
2. Linux because it is very robust and easy to rescue remotely.
• For an efficient support, the more robust OS (Linux) must be promoted
• a casual reboot is VERY RARELY needed (months to years of use without reboot). Our web server is running for about 500 days without any reboot...
  
• on UNIX, many applications can be loaded without the 'FATAL ERROR blue Screen' fear.
  

The April'98 BYTE issue (pp 60-74) considered MS-Windows PCs as "Unsafe at Any Megahertz" and gave the advice to avoid to install too many applications, and to avoid to launch too many simultaneous applications. 

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The paper conclusion was :


'Why buying mighty machines just to avoid to use them at full power'


Remark : concerns only the so-called 'WINTEL' machines (MS-Windows on Intel PCs), not the PCs running UNIX.

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• Performance boost (150 to 200 % of Windows-NT on the same hardware) : even old 386 machines can be decently used and 486 ones to enjoy the graphics of X-Window