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Bruce Flockhart IT/DIS
In the fast moving world of modern electronics, it is very hard to keep up with the changes. This is especially true for PC systems, where it seems that a new and more powerful processor is announced every few months. To try to stay up to date with these trends, CERN's personal computer supply system has been modified, and to serve better the user community, the previous shop structure has been split into two parts:
http://asdcwww.cern.ch/),
and,
In addition, for the PC Shop side, a new tender exercise was made recently, and as a result of this three companies were selected to supply CERN's needs for Intel based PC's plus a fourth for portable PCs only. The firms selected were:
A number of generic PC models have been defined, to allow first-time
users to select easily the hardware most appropriate
to their requirement. These are the so-called
"PRIMA, OPTIMA, EXTENSA and EXTREMA".
(We have given them CERN names to ease identification and ordering by users.)
The range covers the Pentium 166 MMX based PC all the way to the
Pentium II 266 based PC. All will run
Windows 95, Windows NT and Linux.
The machines are delivered ready to run
NICE or NICE-NT
in the CERN environment, with a mouse, a network card, sound card
and advanced graphics. For NICE, all the user needs to do is to register
the PC for use on the CERN network
(this can be done on the Web, at URL:
http://wwwcs.cern.ch/register).
For NICE-NT and Linux, for the moment, we provide receipes for
self-installation.
More details of the various offerings, together with performance figures of the various PC configurations that have been tested, and approved for sale within CERN, can be found on the PC Shop Web page, at URL:
http://pcwww.cern.ch
Special and custom configurations are also possible. Users are requested to consult the PC Shop directly for this service. In addition to the PCs themselves, 17" and 21" monitors are also available, as are CERN standard hardware cards, hard disks and memory modules.
The PC Shop staff consists of: