This is a new desktop computer with eComStation 2.1 installed and configured. A Solid State Drive (SSD) is provided for fast storage for operating system and programs. Sound, USB and wired network work. The display hardware is supported by SNAP graphics in accelerated mode. Lots of useful OS/2 software is installed.
The Suntan Special Advantage
Pubopeep comes with Suntan Special. I use Suntan Special to install the software on all Blonde Guy computers. Suntan Special software can be used to install all updates to the system and its applications and to install additional applications. When newer versions of software are released, Suntan Special can keep your Blonde Guy computer up to date.
Capabilities
This computer has one 40 GB SSD and one 500 GB hard disk.
I have supplied sufficient RAM to allow many programs to run at once, or support virtual machines.
The USB 2.0 ports support keyboards, mice, scanners, thumb drives, cameras, MP3 players, external hard drives, floppies and CD Writers.
The DVD writer can read and write dual-layer DVD media with an 8.4 GB capacity. Software to create bootable backup DVDs is included.
The display hardware is based on the ATIŠ Radeon X300, which provides fast graphics on the OS/2 or eComStation platforms. The graphics driver is SNAP, which provides accelleration for this chipset.
Connectors for sound and USB are provided on both the front and the rear of the computer for convenience.
The computer can function with both CPUs using ACPI, or it can fall back to one CPU with APM. All peripherals work with either power management scheme.
Defects
Although 4 GB RAM is installed, the computer will only recognize 3 GB due to hardware limitations.
Not Included
None of the following items are included: monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, ethernet cable, printer cable, USB cable. If you need any of these contact Blonde Guy for a quote.
Software
- Blonde Guy computers run the eComStation 2.1 GA release.
- Suntan Special is included with each computer. All applications that are pre-installed by Blonde Guy can be kept up to date using Suntan Special.
- The OpenOffice.org office suite is installed. OpenOffice has good compatibility with Microsoft Office documents.
- The ePDF software has been installed to allow the creation of PDF output from any OS/2 application. Speaking of PDF, Acrobat Reader 5, Lucide, GSView and GhostScript are installed. The Acrobat Reader 5 is configured as a plugin for each of the installed browsers. Lucide is associated with desktop PDF objects.
- Computer maintenance programs include eCS-MT, Suntan Special, a trial version of DFSee, Sysbench to measure the speed of the computer, SmartMon to asses hard drive condition, PCI to scan the system hardware and SystemInfo to view the entire computer configuration.
- The Embellish graphics editor and a demo of the PMView graphics viewer are installed.
- The FAT32 file system is installed.
- Firefox, and Seamonkey web browsers and Blue Griffon, a powerful web page editor, is installed. Each browser has flash and acrobat plugins configured.
- Thunderbird, PMMail and Polarbar Mailer are installed to provide a choice of e-mail client program.
- Java 1.1, Java 1.3.1, Java 1.4.2 and Java 6.00 are all installed to give a choice of Java platform. The Java 1.4.2 plugin is used in an older browser installed for that purpose. Suntan Special allows you to change the java support in that browser.
- VLC media player is installed to play back most video file types and commercial DVDs.
- PM123 and Z! music players are provided to support music needs. The CD Player is correctly configured to play music CDs. Generic MP3 players that connect via USB are supported.
- Mr. Message is provided to allow participation with AOL Messenger users.
- Night Vision provides a view of the night time sky and any location and time.
- Software developers will appreciate SmartCVS and SmartSVN, which allow browsing of open source project source code at Netlabs and SourceForge. The Visual SlickEdit and med programmer's editors are provided. The gcc compiler, perl, WDSibyl and the OS/2 toolkit are installed.
- Cameraderie and Fotoget provide support for digital cameras.
- I use rsync, which is a mirroring program, to keep several copies of my data drive. The rsync program copies only files that have changed, added or removed when it updates a copy of the data drive.
Graphics by Colorful Language
Copyright 2012 by Blonde Guy