[RTTY] Building a PC for the radio

[Peter Laws]

I have two PCs at N5UWY, the Radio PC running the XP dongle for N1MM,
DXLab Suite, MMTTY, etc, and the Other PC that runs Kubuntu.  Usually,
I just do radio on the Radio PC and all the goofing around on the
Other PC.

Well, I was off a week at the end of last month (fixing antennae,
mostly!) and had the radio on one day listening on 50.125.  At some
point, goofing around on the web on the Windows PC, I managed to get
one of those fake AntiVirus trojans on the system.  Fortunately,
Symantec caught and killed it.  First time I've had malware of any
sort since I was running Win3.1 and McAfee caught it then.

Anyway that made me think of my longstanding-yet-never-acted-upon plan
to consolidate systems at N5UWY.

The Other PC has a P4 with 2GB of RAM (maxed out).  I *think* that
might be enough to run XP in a VirtualBox VM.  Since I currently run
XP on a 1.6GHz Duron in 1 GB of RAM, I don't think there will be much
degradation in performance.

The other option is to just get a new mobo and CPU for the Radio PC
and go from there.  The benefit there is that I can look for one that
is known to be RFI quiet.

Either way, I'd still run XP in a VM just because ...  :-)

The big outstanding question is how XP will work with my 4-Port Siig
serial card **in a VM**.  If anyone has experience, please post!

Also, if folks have recommendations for motherboards known to be
RFI-quiet, I'd like to hear about them since I am leaning towards
updating the Radio PC.  I've got a decent SoundBlaster that I will
probably keep, plus the Siig card, but nothing else, so 3 slots would
probably be enough.  Video on this board is AGP, but I doubt anything
modern has a slot for that!  :-)


-- 
Peter Laws | N5UWY | plaws plaws net | Travel by Train!