alice-teacher Running Alice on older PCs

[Jack Chen]

Edward,

It sounds like you have inadequate hardware.  I am successfully running 
Alice 2.2 using 7 year old computers (Pentium 4, 2.0 GHz equivalents) 
with Windows XP (Service Pack 3)....I also have a few Dells in the mix. 
  I make sure that all my lab PCs have 1 GB of RAM and "low-end" 
discrete video cards.  With this setup, the computers are OK with the 
"slow and steady" version of Alice 2.2.

In my experience, the computers absolutely need the 1GB of RAM and the 
discrete video cards in Windows XP.  The built-in video capabilities of 
typical computer motherboards is not adequate (Especially with older 
Dells).  Also, Dells also tend to come to school minimally 
equipped...sometimes with only 256MB of RAM under Windows XP.

My recommendation is to upgrade your hardware as best as you can...if 
you need RAM, then perhaps you can cannibalize memory sticks from other 
computers.  That is, use the RAM from two computers in one machine....I 
don't have any advice about video cards but the cheapest $15-$20 card 
that you can buy today will work just fine.

All the best,
Jack Chen


On 11/15/2011 7:50 PM, Don Slater wrote:
> Did you try the Slow But Steady version of Alice that is part of the
> Windows download?
>
> Later, Don Slater
>
> On Nov 15, 2011, at 6:07 PM, Fisher, Edward S. wrote:
>
>> Our environment is 6 year old Dell PC's running XP.  The Alice 2.2
>> tutorials fail with errors stating video card is not able to handle
>> things and it will try to use software rendering.  This too fails.
>>
>> Anyone have any suggestions?
>>
>>
>>
>> Edward S. Fisher Teacher of Mathematics and Computer Science
>> Webmaster _______________________________________________
>> alice-teachers mailing list alice-teachers at lists.andrew.cmu.edu
>> https://lists.andrew.cmu.edu/mailman/listinfo/alice-teachers
>>
>
> _______________________________________________ alice-teachers
> mailing list alice-teachers at lists.andrew.cmu.edu
> https://lists.andrew.cmu.edu/mailman/listinfo/alice-teachers