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Subject:Re: Which computer for a contractor? From:Stuart Burnfield <slb -at- FS -dot- COM -dot- AU> Date:Mon, 28 Jul 1997 14:35:04 +0800
I thought Alexander's summary was excellent. Some other things that
might affect your decision:
Do you want to specialise in a particular platform or be able to take
work for as many platforms as possible? If you expect to work only on
Windows applications or only on Mac applications, then your choice is
obvious.
If you would like to work with Windows, UNIX, Mac, OS/2, and anything
else going, then you should set up your primary machine to be whatever
you're most comfortable and productive in, and set up your secondary
machine to be flexible. That means a big hard drive with room for several
OSes, and a modem and terminal emulation software so that you can run
applications on a remote server.
This doesn't mean that you need to have four OSes loaded from day one,
but if a job comes up requiring, say, Solaris, it would be nice to have
a partition with enough free space to install it quickly and easily.
Software: FrameMaker and MS Word. A good screen capture and graphics
conversion utility. Net software -- e-mail, browser, FTP.
All this could run to many thousands of dollars, depending on what you
already have. If you can't afford it all at once, you'll have to work
out your priorities. For example, if you don't need the disk space right
now it will be cheaper to buy 2 GB next year than an extra GB now.
Personally, I like Frame and loathe MS Word, but there's no need to buy
a Frame licence until you need it.
Regards
---
Stuart Burnfield Coolly hotdogging down the black diamond
Functional Software Pty Ltd runs of Val D'Techwr -- Platform War, mailto:slb -at- fs -dot- com -dot- au Which DTP, What Hardware. . . bump, bump,
bump, whoosh!
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