Video card - still recommended?

[BillDunklau]

Our junior high and high school students really enjoy - and learn from - Alice. Thanks for creating such an educational environment!

Your published "recommended hardware requirements" are:
A Pentium running at 1.0 GHz or better
8 MB 3D video card (TNT, i810, Voodoo 3, Rage 128 equivalent or better)
256 MB of RAM

I am getting ready to buy 20 new computers and want to make sure that we adequately power the young lady (we are on 433 MHz Celeron machines now). What are your current hardware requirements (those video cards mentioned above are a little old, right)?

With a 1GB memory and average CPU in a new machine, should we still specify that we need a separate video card? (Will it help prevent crashes, improve execution speed, provide more vivid color?)

Thanks in advance for your guidance and suggestions. I just don't want to under-buy.

Bill Dunklau
Chair, Computer Science
Lakehill Preparatory School

[pausch]

You definitely want that gig of memory. It's getting hard to *not* have a reasonable graphics card, since most PCs ship with one - and we would still recommend it.

As you note, the specific ones we mention are indeed a little old, but we definitely think having a graphics card is the right investment. Otherwise, you're asking the main CPU to do all the rendering "in software" and that will definitely be slower.

Hope this helps!