Setting the scene:
I've been using two computers at Lonely Spoon Observatory: an Asus laptop with 512 SSD and other good bits, and an older, donated desktop with hard drive, good video and memory and lots of usb ports.
The laptop controls the mount, dome guiding and an ATIK OSC camera while the desktop controls just the current interchangeable camera, (currently a QHY for planetary), focussing and filterwheel.
Comes the end of Christmas day, great sky, and up I went to do Jupiter and Mars. Got about 3 hrs in until the mount battery said times up. Happy times! Started transferring lots of video to my new Chrissie present, a 5Tb 'rugged' usb-c drive.
Left it doing that, knowing it would shut down when it finished.
Disaster strikes:
Came back up after a truly hot yesterday to find the drive still running and the screen frozen
. Had to do a 5sec shutdown and it wouldn't restart- and everything was hot.
Fortunately, the 5Tb drive was fine, and had all the data on it!
Faced with having half the observatory out of action, my wonderful wife said "Get what you need" and I now have an ASUS Ryzen 7 16GB/1TB Strix Gaming Desktop coming early in January. I sure picked the right life partner!
Faster chip, lots of ports, great graphics handling and win11.
Hopefully now I will get the high frame rates I want, and better download times for DSI and I won't get the "this would work faster with a usb 3 port, idiot!" and "NINA no longer likes working with antique Windows operating system" messages!
When it is all plumbed in I'll let people know how it shapes up, if any are interested.
Happy Christmas and NY to you all.
Neville
LSO
