Computer and Measurement Hardware Requirements // Standard

Measurement hardware requirements

Computer Requirements

Hardware

Minimum of 1.5 GHz Intel Compatible CPU, 512 MByte memory, 10 GByte free harddisk space.

For four channels or more: 3 GHz Intel Compatible CPU, 1 GByte memory. 50 GByte free harddisk space.

Note: noiseLAB 2.1 does not run on multiple core processors. Hyperthreading must be disabled. This is set in your computer BIOS.

noiseLAB 3.0 supports hyperthreaded and muti-core processors.

Disk space requirements: 1.5 GByte per channel per hour.

Graphics Card: noiseLAB is designed for 1024 x 768 pixel display. The noiseLAB window size is fixed to fit this display size or larger.
noiseLAB front panels are not rescable in size.

Software

Operating Systems

noiseLAB is supported on

Windows XP Home

Windows XP Professional

noiseLAB is only supported on Service Pack 2 of the above.

Microsoft Word

To fully exploit the report generation capabilities (XML Stylesheets) of noiseLAB require the use with

Microsoft Office 2003 Professional Edition

Word 2003 (Stand-alone edition) with XML support.

DELTA does not provide support for any other operating systems or Office Versions than the ones mentioned above. This is to give as reliable a product as possible, and to keep the end user total cost of ownership costs as low as possible.

When noiseLAB is installed, the

is also installed automatically. Should you happen to have other versions of LabVIEW on your machine, this will not conflict with them, and the automatic installation of this run-time engine ensures that you have a consistent system without version conflicts.

Notes on Real time Performance:

When you use noiseLAB to acquire data, it is important to note that high speed data will be coming into you PC from one or more channels and will be stored on your hard disk. For example, with one channel active you may be streaming about 300 kBytes/second to disk, and all of this data must be stored without any data loss. To ensure this, noiseLAB is designed with significant buffering capabilities and real-time prioritization.

While noiseLAB is streaming data to disk, you will be performing other tasks, such as marking events on the screen showing the real time data, be performing FFT analysis or octave analysis. All of these tasks place a load on the PC and its disk system. To ensure that the data are acquired without loss, these other tasks are assigned lower priority, and will therefore may not run as fast when no data is being acquired.

It is strongly recommended that your machine is configured as follows:

Use a dedicated machine specifically for measurement applications.
Virus scan should be disabled and shut off.
Firewall should be shut off during measurements.
Automatic power saving schemes must be shut off.
Laptops must be configured to never turn off disk or screen, or set the CPU reduced performance.
Turn off utlities that perform disk caching or create virtual memory file systems.
Windows Automatic Indexing should be shut off.
Install only the absolute minimum amount of software required. i.e. operating system, Office 2003 and noiseLAB. Although there are many handy utlities you should minimize use of these, unless you have a clear understand of how they affect the spawning of extra processes which may affect real time performance.
Most IT departments have standard configured computers which may not be appropriate for real-time data acquisition and measurement. In our experience an internal IT department may or may not be willing to support a non-standard computer.

For proper performance of the software, it is also important that the PC is set up with the correct hardware configuration.

DELTA makes every reasonable effort to provide software that will run on machines configured as described. However, due to the extreme complexity of modern computers, there is a small chance that you may not able to successfully run noiseLAB on a given PC, even if it is configured correctly. Therefore, DELTA provides a 30 day return policy.