701 Benchmarking (baseline) has begun

[Randal Whittle <rwhittle@usa.net>]

To all those concerned about the 701 PEP upgrade:

Yesterday I received the CD's from Ziff-Davis for Winstone 98 and Winbench
98, and I have begun running these benchmarks on the "base" 701.

I will also be running Wintune 95 and because it is convenient, Norton
Utilities' (2.0) little benchmark for processor speed.

Winstone takes forever and every little hiccup has to be attended to--I
left it running last night thinking it would be done today, but alas...the
PowerPoint test didn't go over well (neither did the Netscape test--I had
to abort that one) and needed to be re-started this morning.

At any rate, when I complete all these benchmarks to get a baseline for my
stock 701, I will send the machine in (presumably this week) to PEP for the
upgrade.  I don't know how long that will take, but whenever it comes back,
I'll run all of these again and we'll have "before & after" results to look
at.

I *presume* you don't want me to post long reports of the results to the
list, so I'll probably send them directly to Emanuel Brown for posting on
his Website (and someone else volunteered...was it Dave Ross or Mitchell
Yee?  And Mitchell Yee wanted to send me a 701 HD with the statistics
package SAS loaded on it and run some Stats-related tasks on it.  Mitch,
just run the baselines on your base machine, then send me the HD (with
instructions) once my upgraded machine is ready...well, get it ready, we're
almost ready to go!

Meanwhile, Lee Laniear may want to contact me as he was going to bring an
OS/2 HD to stick into my upgraded 701 machine and run some OS/2-specific
tests.  I presume that will be in a week or two, Lee, so mark your
calendar.  If you will run those OS/2 tests on your stock machine to get a
baseline, then we'll be ready there.

Meanwhile, those who are going to post the results (E. Brown and whoever
else) on websites, please contact me directly regarding how I should send
these results to you.  For instance, the ZD benchmarks save to some sort of
database.  I haven't had a chance to play with it yet (the machine is too
busy *running* them), so I'm not sure if I can just print a report out in
ASCII form to send to you.  Or perhaps in Excel?  Talk to me!  :-)


-------
Randal J. Whittle		whittle@usc.edu	(213) 740-7775
Director, Electronic Commerce Program
Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California