Minimum System Requirements for Access 2000? 1

[Dougmeister]

My boss asked me what hardware I would need to program in MS Access 2000. I need to keep in mind that we may be upgrading to a more recent version of Access in the future.

Right now, I have a P4, 1.8 GHz Gateway w/ 512 MB RAM.

I am hoping that you all can give me a recommendation/justification for a new machine.

What makes the most impact when using Access from a development point of view? I would think that CPU and RAM, but not multiple CPU's.

(Multiple CPU's would not help Access, per se, but would help when multitasking between Access and other applications, right?)

Also, SCSI drives wouldn't help that much?
Same with RAID?
What about hyperthreading?

I'm thinking: (I looked at Dell)

Intel® Xeon™ Processor, 3.20GHz, 1MB L3 Cache
(fastest CPU I can find)

XP Professional (or 2000? Hyper-threading only available in XP; does Hyperthreading affect MS Access?)

1GB,DDR266 SDRAM Memory,ECC (2 DIMMS)

Your advice is appreciated. Thanks.

 

[jrbarnett]

Doug

Your current machine is more than fast enough for running the latest version of Access and office on 2000 or XP Pro together with lots of other applications.
The only thing you might want to consider is a bit more memory (upgrade to 1Gb) if you do a lot of heavy multitasking across applications, or run MSDE on your system.

The only applications that can really justify state of the art hardware now are heavy duty multimedia apps (eg graphics rendering or sound/video editing), modern 3D games or statistical analysis of large (multi gigabyte) data sets.

John

 

[jrbarnett]

I should add that I run an Athlon 1GHz box with 384Mb RAM, 30Gb disk, CD-RW & DVD-ROM drives, NVidia Geforce2MX graphics card, 19" CRT monitor with Windows 2000 and Office XP Pro, and its fine.
The machine is 3 years old and I have no need to upgrade. Its certainly not slow.

John

 

[Dougmeister]

Thanks.

Any comments on:

1) multiple CPUs
2) Hyperthreading (only avail. in Win XP)?

 

[jrbarnett]

Multiple CPU's: Access is not designed to make use of them, but if you run 2K Pro or XP Pro and do heavy multitasking, you may benefit in increased system speed. Remember though that the rest of the PC has to be up to spec as well - ie lots of RAM, fast hard disk in order to benefit.

Hyperthreading in the latest P4 systems: Can slow down some applications that don't use multithreaded apps.
From what I have heard it is better to leave it switched off unless you use applications that are written to use them; Access - and other Office applications - don't.

John