Over the past few weeks the reliability of my dedicated weather PC was getting worse, probably due to the number of concurrent applications running and the fact that it is never switched off.

I decided to get a more ‘gruntier’ one, not sure if that’s the correct word, not only to  server my weather site  but become my main PC, therefore a number of radio related applications needed installing as well.

I used GNG computers in Huntingdon who I have used a number of times before and have never been disappointed on cost, quality or speed of delivery.

The PC is a Dell Precision 490 and has duel Xeon 3Ghz 2 core processors, 8Gb of RAM and two hard drives (well the second one will be fitted soon) 650Gb and 1Tb, the 1Tb will be a mirror of the main drive and have the backups on it.

The process to transfer the weather programs was a nightmare as a number of them were licensed to one PC, moving the programs meant transferring licenses, so I’ll bore you with the programs I transferred or installed: –

Orbitron, WSPR, Dl-Digi,Fl-Digi, Ham Radio Deluxe, HDSDR, MMSSTX, DX Atlas, Echolink, Raidar, CCleaner, Notepad++, Filezilla, Google earth, Microsoft Office, Kaspersky, Teamviewer, Livezilla, Diffmerge, The Owl, VXM remote, Arduino, Z-Zip, LifeCam, Olympus digital camera, Dropbox, Google Docs, E-mail, Weather Display, Nexstorm, Startwatch, StormvueNGX, Sentry, Sebectec, Wxsim, Wxmate, WASP2, Discharge, Acronis 2015, System Scheduler, WDL configurator, Microsoft Expression, Strikestar EU, Skype, Visio and Image resizer!

I must say that it is blisteringly fast and I can comfortably now do more than one thing at once, which is quite an achievement for a bloke.

Update

Replaced PC with Meteobridge Pro, blog on that HERE.

Took advantage of the break ant tweaked the Chatteris Weather PC, the original Weather Display software is version 10.37R Build 81, I finally decided to upload the Beta version 10.37R Build 255, at the same time I tided the file structure.  If you were monitoring the site today you would have noticed intermittent outages as certain elements stopped working, or were only partially right, for example, automated Tweets on the 1/2 hour were sent without any weather data attached, only the webcam image.

I changed the Cookie- Consent provider as well today, the new type will cause a pop-up box at the bottom left of the screen, you can either accept that Chatteris Weather uses cookies by clicking on the green tab and the box will disappear for 30 days.  If your not sure, clicking ‘Read More’ will take you to the Privacy Policy page.

In order to save a little bit of upload bandwidth, I’ve throttled back some of the data frequency, this will not be noticeable, but it’s a back office function which need doing.

Due to a number of problems which is to be expected on a Beta version of software, I have reverted back to the original version and build, I will keep downloading and testing as everything is now configured, so hopefully downtime will be at an absolute minimum.