Recommended for a development system (Windows PC)...

[PJS]

In the LabVIEW 8 package, they give minimum system requirements for processor and recommended system requirements for the RTE and development disk space.  What is the recommended system configuration for the LabVIEW development environment?  I would really like someone from NI to answer this and be able to back it up with some documentation.  I am spec'ing a new laptop and would like to insure that my system is adequately, not minimally, prepared to use as a full development machine.

Thanks,

Paul

[Mark H]

I'm not quite sure what information you are missing - all the minimum and reccommended requirements are listed on pages 2 to 5 of the Release Notes booklet, which is also in PDF form "LV_Release_Notes.pdf" on your hard drive after installation.

[Mark H]

Windows 2000/XP/XP x64

512MB RAM

Pentium 4/M or equivalent

1.2GB of hard drive space for full installation

The minimum requirements are somewhat lower, as are the requirements for run-time applications.

[PJS]

OK, I read this before.  A P4/M what?  Anything?  Is that a little broad for a recommended system configuration?  I am reading from Page(s) 2& 3 of the LV release notes hardcopy.    Heck it takes long enough to open LV 8 using a P4 3GHz with U320 SCSI drives and 2GB of ram on top of that I have a ATI FireGL workstation graphics card.  I can not believe that NI recommends a 1.7GHz P4/m processor in a laptop as an optimal configuration, this does not bring up the fact of the display artifacts that are so much worse in LV8 over 7.1 and as most know, the graphics card in a laptop is the likely culprit in a speed bottleneck. 

 In my head, I have a pretty good idea of what the recommended requirements should be, but that does not mean squat when trying to justify a computer purchase.   Do we have anything better?

[Ben]

"Heck it takes long enough to open LV 8 using a P4 3GHz..."

I think that only happens the first time you open LV 8 on any particular day. I did some testing and found that there was an exponential rise in the time required to open LV when you plot the initial load time vs LV version.

The second time I open it (on any day) it only takes about 8-9 seconds.

That is using a 3G Laptop with 512M memory.

I suspect "ET is phoning home".

Ben

Message Edited by Ben on 12-08-2005 09:51 AM

[Mark H]

I guess the lowest speed P4/M will be more than adequate (remember the minimum is only a Celeron 866).

I fully intend to install on my home PIII 600MHz, and from experience I don't think that there will be any problems.

I don't know why LV8 takes so long to get started - my work development machine is a P4 1.8GHz with 256MB RAM (not quite optimal but above minimum) - it seems to take between 30 to 40 seconds to get going whereas LV7 only takes just 5 seconds or so. This slow start up is really quite annoying - I can't see any reason why any software should take so long to load up and be ready for use.

I really don't think any relatively modern graphics card would cause a bottle neck in LV, lap top or otherwise. You only need the full capabilty of graphics cards for rendering of fast 3D moving images (i.e game playing), nothing LabVIEW does requires that level of performance - and even most lap top graphics chips are extremely capable.