What parts for a $1,000 top of the line Office Computer?

[Mongoo]

I need to know the best components for creating an extreamly fast Office computer. The goal is to create OCR PDF's as fast as possible. This will be used for scanning pages regularly from a commerical scanner. Right now the computer we are using is taking along time to save the pdf's.

So, what are the fastest components we can get for around $1,000 give or take? This is only for the computer nothing else. It will only be used for office tasks, and it only concern is to create complex pdf's as fast as possible.

Thank you.

 

[mechBgon]

Are the PDF files being stored locally, or on the network?

 

[FlyingPenguin]

If this is for a business, and is going to see heavy use, and needs to be reliable, why are you custom building it? You can buy a Dell Precision 370 or 470 workstation for around that price.

 

[imported_Tick]

Originally posted by: FlyingPenguin
If this is for a business, and is going to see heavy use, and needs to be reliable, why are you custom building it? You can buy a Dell Precision 370 or 470 workstation for around that price.

Agreed. Or, if you have an anti-dell complex, get an alienware work station. Don't custom build high-reliability, high-use office computers. Just asking for pain.

 

[imported_Kensai]

You tell them to asign a bigger budget for it.

 

[imported_Tick]

Originally posted by: Kensai
You tell them to asign a bigger budget for it.

Lol. I thought that as well.

 

[Mongoo]

Okay, well what would be a more realistic budget? Dell is fine but I need to know what it gives you. The files will be stored locally. What are the current best specs to look for in terms of Processor speed, bus speed, memory speed ect.

Right now how fast we can process these PDF's is a major bottle neck so It doesn't matter what it is be it custom built or premade. It just needs to be able to process scanned pages as fast as possible within a resonable price. $1,000 is more ideal but I'm guessing $3,000 is absolute tops. I'm just guessing at the what the willing price should be, I'm not in charge of that. Remember this is just for the computer, no monitor or anything else.

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: Mongoo
Okay, well what would be a more realistic budget? Dell is fine but I need to know what it gives you. The files will be stored locally. What are the current best specs to look for in terms of Processor speed, bus speed, memory speed ect.

Right now how fast we can process these PDF's is a major bottle neck so It doesn't matter what it is be it custom built or premade. It just needs to be able to process scanned pages as fast as possible within a resonable price. $1,000 is more ideal but I'm guessing $3,000 is absolute tops. I'm just guessing at the what the willing price should be, I'm not in charge of that. Remember this is just for the computer, no monitor or anything else.

just out of curiosity, what software and type of scanner?

 

[biostud]

He our company just did a overkill in that department. We had used a PIII 700Mhz w 128Mb ram and W2K. It was painfully slow to work with. It was only for burning CD-Roms with PDF's and text editing CD-covers. So basically 512Mb ram + a faster harddrive would probably have been fine. Instead they got a 3Ghz P4 with 2Gb memory. I'm not complaining but for burning CD-roms I thought it was bit much

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: biostud
He our company just did a overkill in that department. We had used a PIII 700Mhz w 128Mb ram and W2K. It was painfully slow to work with. It was only for burning CD-Roms with PDF's and text editing CD-covers. So basically 512Mb ram + a faster harddrive would probably have been fine. Instead they got a 3Ghz P4 with 2Gb memory. I'm not complaining but for burning CD-roms I thought it was bit much

i think the op wants a machine that takes a page of paper, runs it through the scanner, ocrs it then outputs it to a pdf, which would take more power. i am assuming it would be one of the larger scanners with a adf attached.

if the op would let me know what type of scanner, i kind of need to ocr and convert a bunch of pages (approx 2000) to pdf documents, i would greatly appreciate it.

 

[biostud]

Originally posted by: bob4432

Originally posted by: biostud
He our company just did a overkill in that department. We had used a PIII 700Mhz w 128Mb ram and W2K. It was painfully slow to work with. It was only for burning CD-Roms with PDF's and text editing CD-covers. So basically 512Mb ram + a faster harddrive would probably have been fine. Instead they got a 3Ghz P4 with 2Gb memory. I'm not complaining but for burning CD-roms I thought it was bit much

i think the op wants a machine that takes a page of paper, runs it through the scanner, ocrs it then outputs it to a pdf, which would take more power. i am assuming it would be one of the larger scanners with a adf attached.

if the op would let me know what type of scanner, i kind of need to ocr and convert a bunch of pages (approx 2000) to pdf documents, i would greatly appreciate it.

I know, it just reminded me of that.

 

[6000SUX]

Instead of throwing hardware at the problem, I'd first do a wide sweep of what software is currently available for creating the PDFs. I'm assuming the processor is the bottleneck, but is it the OCR or the PDF generation? Creating even a fairly large text-heavy PDF should run somewhere in the milliseconds with decent software.

 

[Mongoo]

The printer is a Cannon (6800? don't quote me on that though). Its a combination printer/scanner. It scans and prints color and black & White. It very big, like about 4-5' tall 4' wide and 4 feet deep with 4 paper trays. The setup we have came with its own computer & software called E-Copy. The Idea is that it is suppose to scan pages and send both an OCR'ed Tiff and PDF image to a computer. The Tiff saves fast enough but the new searchable pdf's are taking too long. Right now I think 360 pages of OCR'ed PDFs takes about 40 minutes to save on a new computer we got. On the old one it took 3 hours.

The new computer is just temporary untill we can get an even better one. It is 3ghz P4 with 1 gig memory Windows XP, from a microcenter. I was told it's bus was not as fast as it could be. Like I say this machine does 360 pages in about 40 minutes.

This is for a small buissness so the cost for a new machine is up to question. Were just trying to knock down that time as much as we can, but still being resonable to the cost.

We've had alot of problems with this new scanner/printer already, and tech support isn't helping much. What ever we get, It really needs to solve this problem and not create more.

Thanks for all of your inpute.