Experiencing our second week long gray out! We had about 10 minutes of watery sunshine this morning but the clouds have rolled in again in force! Good time to work on images and data I guess, but it is hard to get motivated with such gloomy weather!
When I bought Temple 28 (11″ Customized Celestron CPC) a year ago it came with a Lenovo ThinkCenter Desktop computer. Dual core and completely loaded with all the software to run everything. Compared to some of the computers I have used to run similar rigs this thing is a Ferrari! Still I was having problems controlling the computer by Teamviewer and it would crash a lot. So during our last gray period I actually looked to see how much memory the thing had. 2 Gbs with a 64 bit operating system! No wonder I was having issues! A 64 bit Windows system needs at least 3 but better 4 Gbs of memory to run smoothly. If you were only running text type of software 2 Gbs would be adequate but not when you are auto running lots of images. So I looked up the memory for the computer and ordered 2 more Gbs on Ebay. Wrong type! Looked in my scrap box and found 1 Gb of compatible memory.
Wow, what a difference even 3 Gbs make! No problems using TeamViewer, no issues with all the programs you have to run to control the scope. I have 1 more gb coming that should make the computer much more user friendly. Though you can use up to 8 Gbs in this system 4 seems to be the best trade off between speed and cost.
I am looking forward to more sunshine! With sunshine comes dark nights! So Clear skies everyone!
Paul Temple