"public" program computer

[ShadowBlade]

we have three computers in our house that all use the same programs...but two of them are mfr'ed so they only have 40GB HDs, the hard drives are almost full (obviously) and i was considering using an older computer as sort of a public computer to host all of the programs (this way i only have to buy one new hard drive instead of two or three) my question is...would i need to upgrade our network to gigabit and if so, would it cost more to upgrade to Gb or buy two or three 80-120GB hard drives?

 

[JackMDS]

Programs need to be on the Hard drive of the computer that they are running on.

I.e. If your 40GB are full because you have so much Programs you need to upgrade your computer to larger Drives

Files (as in document, mp3, JPG, and any other information files) can reside on one computer and being shared by the rest of the network computers.

You do need Giga Network to share and run good Network. The word Giga as in GB Hard Drive Capacity, and Gb/sec Network as nothing to do one with the other.

About Giga Network: Peer to Peer Giga Home Networks.

 

[ShadowBlade]

i cant just map the program files folder as a network drive and link to the programs in it.....right now ive got these programs installed on all three computers.....so id remove them if they were all on one to avoid getting new drives ... i was asking about gigabit because if the programs are running off of another computer, wouldnt Gb improve loading times and such

 

[skyking]

programs have to be installed on the local machine. they need those things like registry entries to work. The only exception to that is if you went with a 2k or 2k3 server and terminal services. That is spendy
files, on the other hand, can go on fileservers.

 

[kamper]

You'd still have to install each program seperately for each computer (trying to run the same installation on 3 different computers isn't going to work all that well) so you'd sitll need the same amount of disk space.

I might be wrong with this but gigabit ethernet is only going to improve your bandwidth (and I doubt you'd need 1gbs to run an executable). What you really need to run programs from a remote location like that is low latency.