I would like to solicit your opinions on a matter of new hardware and
software. I'm the designated computer person in a research group
studying vitamin A. Our work involves a great deal of HPLC, utilizing
photodiode-arrays and UV/visible spectrophotometers. We are looking
into new software and hardware to accompany a new HPLC system we will
be purchasing. Here I will share some of my own information and opinions,
and perhaps some of you out there could add to them.
One software system we viewed recently is the new Millenium system from
Waters Chromatography Division of Millipore. It is PC-based, running under
Windows 3.1 and requiring at least a 386-25MHz with 12MB RAM and a 120MB
hard drive. It includes instrument control and automation, data acquisition
and analysis, and a much-heralded database feature that manages large
collections of chromatographic data. My main reason for hesitation about
Millenium is that it is right out of R&D: even the demonstration version
was 0.40, and version 1.0 is expected to ship later in June. Thus, it has
not stood the test of usage by all of the neophytes out there. In addition,
I feel that PC-based systems are not the way of the future, given their
stand-alone design. I'd prefer a system that runs on a DEC workstation
running XWindows under Unix. Unix systems are much more adept at file-
transfer and multi-user, multi-task environments. Although Microsoft Windows
purports to be a multi-tasking environment, you still need a pretty fast PC
to run multiple tasks at an acceptable speed. However, other members of
our group may be more amenable to a Windows system, so we'll keep our
options open.
Can anyone suggest a good PC or DEC-based chromatography system?
Or are there even any systems that run on DEC? I am posting this
to both sci.comp-aided and bionet.software, and feel free to post back
under either group. Thank you.
George
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___ ____ George Einar Applequist
/ \ / /\ Dept. of Biochemistry and Biophysics
/ __/_______/__\____ Iowa State University
\ \ \ / \ / Ames, Iowa
\___/ \____/ \/
E-mail to gea at iastate.edu
Phone and address available on request.
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