Cumulus Support

Hi,
I want to set up a permanent pc - hooked up to my weather station and web cam.
As at the moment i use my laptop. Obviously this is a pain when i just want to do other work on the computer. What is the recommended specs/ operating system to use for this always on set up?
I am using windows 7 on a medium spec laptop at the moment which work fine for cumulus and yawcam/ microsoft lifecam 3000.
Cheers.

Mine runs on it's own pc, alongside running the webcam, its running 768mb ram, pentium 4, windows xp

Thanks Rob....i have been looking in the classified adds...quite a few bargain pc's out there of the older specs.....i need to get one soon ....going crackers unplugging the lappy and replugging in etc...
cheers..

Have you heard of freegle? It's the uk version of freecycle, basically local people getting rid of things they don't want but not throwing them in the tip. Well I had this pc from a request on there, so it didn't cost me a penny,

I use the smallest laptop I have (1.2 GHz single core Pentium, 1 GB RAM), and balance the power/CPU so it's always on, but it throttles itself down (lowers the clock rate and CPU voltage) when the CPU isn't working hard. I use a program called "Core Temp" to monitor the CPU clock and voltage. Saves a bunch of power (my power consumption drops from 110 Watts to about 60). I also removed the battery and rely on my UPS to keep things going.

I must suck at the power saving stakes as I run 2 laptops, One powers cumulus (plus is a file server) and the other powers Apache, MySQL on an ubuntu setup.

Cheers all for the info.... looks like i will be ok with a relatively low spec pc.....cheap or even free

is this the right place buddy?

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ilkeston_freecycle/