The technology committee in my school had money to buy a new
computer; this computer will be on a multimedia cart with an LCD Panel and
will be used for presentations and demonstrations, plus other duties. So
far, our school has 4 other Macintoshes: 3 LC 575's, 1 LC 630 that
was made before the DOS card was built into the model, and a new Power
Macintosh 5200 (All these computers have 8 MB of RAM). I recommended the
5300 for our new machine because it is a mulimedia workstation with
video-in and video-out with 16 MB of RAM and 1.2 GB on the hard drive. We
can use the Soft Windows program to run DOS and Windows if we want.
The committee went along with my recommendation but some of them thought
we should have gone with the 5200 because it was $700 cheaper and most of
them also wanted a machine that was DOS compatible. Would it have been
better to have decided on the LC630/DOS or the Power Macintosh 6100/DOS? The
630 used to be touted as an audiovisual machine; it has 12 MB of RAM on the
Macintosh board and 4 MB of RAM on the DOS card with 500 MB on the hard
drive. The 6100 has 16 MB of RAM, but only 500 MB on the hard drive and it
isn't really a multimedia workstation and it is as expensive as the 5300.
As the committee chair, did I make the right decision? We have
not yet made the purchase, so we can change our minds.
Thanks for your help,
Marilyn Logue
mlogue@freenet.columbus.oh.us