Hi:
We are in the process of evaluating software to control several pieces
of HPLC related equipment.
At present we have a Hewlett-Packard 1090 HPLC attached to an ISCO
fraction collector. We are considering adding a scintillation counter
in order to get 14-C counts for labeled internal standards. We are
running HP's Chemstation ver 2.02 to get the HPLC data, and the
collector is controlled by a signal from the HPLC in order to get the
fractions we need.
We are thinking of upgrading the HPLC software to the new version from
HP - don't know the version number, but the technical support says it
was just released. I am also looking at management software from
National Instrument, and there are a few others that are listed in the
recent issue of Scientific Computing.
Are there any comments on general HPLC/instrument managers from users
which might help us decide on a company? Should we expect that the
drivers for all the components would be available from the software
companies or the component manufacturers? Or will we have to adapt
general purpose drivers ourselves?
In many cases, we have been advised to get a new computer with a
Pentium (we have a 100 MHz-486) with 32 MB of RAM (we have 16), and a
large storage device (we just upgraded to a 2 GB IDE drive) with
CD-ROM. The new HP software was written for Windows 95, however, we
have also been told by the 3rd party component people to look into
getting Windows NT as our operating system.
There is some, but not much, concern about going to NT. I have had
experience with the Berkeley Unix from Sun. And most of the other
users are computer literate people. However, should we expect that a
program written for Windows 95 will perform-out of the box-on a
machine under NT?
Is the effort of using and administrating (to whatever degree) NT
worth it in our case? Are there other things we should be assessing?
We also have an ELISA reader (and may add a fluorometer) attached to
another machine. We would like to collate the data from these
machines along with the HPLC fractions data. How does this change our
views on 3rd party management software?
Thanks for any help.
Don Chen
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Don Chen * Standard disclaimers apply here.
USDA-ARS-NFSPRC *
3450 SW Campus Way *
Corvallis, OR 97331 *
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541-750-8751/8721 *
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