Nerd
Stuff
Our computer system consists of a networked Acorn RiscPC, desktop PC and laptop PC.
On the Acorn side our hardware includes
- An Acorn StrongArm Risc PC running under RISC OS 4.02
- An 8 Gb hard disc
- A 100 Mb internal SCSI
Zip drive
- 80Mb RAM
- Casio CTK601 MIDI keyboard and MIDI IN
and OUT
- USR Robotics Sportster Voice 33.6 Faxmodem
- Epson GT8500 flatbed
scanner
- Canon film scanner for 35mm slides and negatives and
APS negatives
- Epson D88 colour inkjet printer
- HiFi link
- Psion link - I have a Psion Series 5 and my wife has a Psion Series 3c.
- Pair of powered speakers
- Radio optical mouse
- Network card
If the size of the hard disc and amount of RAM appear small by PC standards do bear in mind that on Acorn computers the operating system is stored in ROM so, unlike any version of Windows, does not use any hard disc space or RAM.
Our main Acorn applications software includes
- Photodesk 3 by
SpaceTech for photography
- ArcFax by David Pilling for fax
- Ovation Pro by David Pilling for word processing and DTP - (see above for link)
- Schema by Clares for
spreadsheets
- Virus protection by Pineapple Software
- DataPower 2 by Iota for data base management
- Artworks
by Computer Concepts (see above for link) for graphics
- Rhapsody by Clares (see above for link) for music
- 6502Em by
Warm Silence Software for BBC emulation
- PsiRisc by Interconnex for
transferring data and files between the Psions and the Acorn
- ClipArt
2 by Fabis, now marketed by R Comp Interactive (see below for link) for managing all my clip art
- Ancestor+
by APDL for our Family Tree
- Sleuth, originally by Beebug but now being marketed by APDL (see above for link) for
OCR
- Equasor by Computer Concepts (for link see above) for mathematical notation
- Roots by Alex Waugh for converting family trees into graphical form.
- Dial Up by R Comp for internet Access (see below for link)
- Messenger by R Comp for e-mail and news (see below for link)
- Oregano by Oregano Networks Limited for web browsing on the Acorn
- HTML Edit by R Comp Interactive for writing and maintaining web sites
- Most of our fonts, including Classical Greek, are by the Electronic Font Foundry
I know that some of this is not exactly state of the art but my philosophy is
- If it aint broke don't fix it, and
- The best is the enemy of the good.
If hardware or software does the job we bought it to do and we have not changed our minds about what we want it to do we see no reason to change it.
On the PC side our hardware includes
- Athlon 1600+ processor
- 1 Gb DDR
- 80 Gb hard drive
- Second 80 Gb hard drive
- External USB 80Gb drive
- External USB 200Gb hard drive (mainly for music and photography)
- Games Pad
- DVD reader/writer
- CDRW drive
- Network card
- Pinnacle Studio deluxe video capture card
- External sound card with HiFi line in and out
- External USB 750 Mb Zip Drive
The system runs under Windows XP Home. Software currently installed on the PC includes
- Internet Explorer 7 and many plug-ins for web browsing
- Orthodox Calendar by St Helen's Orthodox Parish - a program for generating calendars in any of the forms in use by Orthodox Christians. They do not have a web site but you can e-mail me for contact details.
- GCSE Physics, Chemistry and Biology by Dorling Kindersley
- Pinnacle Studio deluxe (including Studio 7) by Pinnacle for making films from recordings made with our video cameras.
- Norton SystemWorks 2007 for internet security and disaster recovery
- Adobe Photoshop Album for managing our digital photograph collection
- Virtuosa for managing our music stored on the computer
The monitor, keyboard and mouse are shared between the two systems by means of the dedicated switch box being marketed by Stuart Tyrrel Developments, and they share the cable modem and each other's hard discs by means of R Comp's “Network in a Box” - this contains a router and all the other hardware, software and instructions you need to network two (or more) computers. (See above for link) We could also use it to share the printer but we prefer to use a dedicated manual switch box. We also share the powered speakers and scanners by switching in this way.
We have a permanent broadband cable connection, the cable modem being connected to the router and so shared by the computers, and our ISP is Virgin Media.
All the buttons, backgrounds and dividers etc on this Web site came from 
11th March 2007