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Mario G. Lafreniere aka Fergie.

http://www.onlink.net/~mgl

jnsigns@onlink.net
Chapleau, Ontario home of "The World's Largest Game Preserve"
Spring is upon us,in Shania Twain Country. Farewell snow,here comes the mosquito!

Dell and IBM both make quality systems. And unless you know somebody who can piece together quality components to build your system, then I would say, 'go for it.'

The only thing that I dislike about pre-built workstations is the proprietary hardware configurations many of them have. Depending on what you buy, you may be stuck with a system that will not allow you with alot of upgrade flexibility. However, general upgrades are usually no problem.

I'm guessing from reading your post that you have several computers that are each hooked up to their 'own' device; that is, one computer for each printer or cutter. Is that correct? If so, it might be nice to have one machine act as a 'print and cut' server, and then have one or more machines that you can do work on. These machines would be networked and you could send your jobs to the cutter, printer, or whatever from any of them.

In this scenario, you can get a pretty basic 'server' machine, that is dedicated to this task. Then you can beef up your workstations with all the processor power, memory, and other horsepower and periferal type stuff.

Then, if one machine goes down, you can just jump to the other one and send your jobs. The server will be left alone, and no one should be able to tinker with it. That way, you'll always have it up and running.

-shane

Instead of the expense of a workstation just to run printers and cutter, get a dedicated print server.

A print server is not a computer, it's a device that you can plug into your network and on the other side it has printer ports.
So using something like this, you can put all your printers/cutters right next to each other.. in a room down the hall if you want.. and instead of spending $2,000 on a server/workstation, you only spent $200 or $300 on a GOOD print server that will do a better job at handling the printing.

The only drawback is that most of em have LPT ports, so if your cutters need serial ports I dont know of any print servers offhand that have serial ports on 'em.. they might exist though.

Check out Epson, HP, Xerox, Canon, and other major printer makers for print servers.
HP might be your best bet, especially if your cutters use the HPGL or HPGL/2 language. HP's print servers are designed for their plotters so cutters should operate as well.

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Mike Pipes
Digital Illusion Custom Graphics
Lake Havasu City, AZ
http://www.stickerpimp.com

I guess I never really considered what I have as a work station. Let me explain.

I am running Omega software(Gerber signmaking software), as well as Corel and Adobe programs on one computer.

Omega lets me run the Edge thermal printer, the two plotters, the ink jet paper printer, the scanner and if I had a router, it would run that also and I suppose a lagre format inkjet printer as well...ALL AT THE SAME TIME.(providing I have enough available memory for all that multitasking.

Is that what you what to do?
I might have achieved what you are trying to do by accident, just sticking with one company for sign making software and hard ware.

Before now, I never really gave much thought to how convienient it is and that other sign shops don't have that ability. I assumed they did or could.

My plan is to purchase CJ-500 (large format printer/cutter) and down the road either an Epson 3000 or 5000 along with a film negative scanner. I don’t find that, having to wait until one job is done before designing or scanning the next job, is very productive. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a 10 hour a day production shop but the sooner I complete the job, the sooner I can go fishing!

Solution 1:
Stay the way that I have it and use one computer system strictly for design work and scanning/proofing and have dedicated systems for the other units.

Solution 2:
Have one computer for design work and scanning/proofing and a workstation and or print server
dedicated to all the printing/cutting units.

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Mario G. Lafreniere aka Fergie.

http://www.onlink.net/~mgl

jnsigns@onlink.net
Chapleau, Ontario home of "The World's Largest Game Preserve"
Spring is upon us,in Shania Twain Country. Farewell snow,here comes the mosquito!

Here's what I would do.

Get a printserver or two to run ALL the printers/cutters/plotters over a network.
This way all machines have access to all printers, which is more productive since you can print from any machine to any printer.

Get scanners that have drivers which allow scanning over a network. My cheap-o UMAX scanner ($250) has such drivers. The scanner hooks up to one computer, but any computer on the network has access to run the scanner.. again, more productive.

So what you'd end up with is printers that arent tied to any specific machine, scanners that can be accessed from any machine, and any machine is available for designing.

Now, the only way you could be more productive is to sprout another set of arms so you can operate both computers simultaneously.

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Mike Pipes
Digital Illusion Custom Graphics
Lake Havasu City, AZ
http://www.stickerpimp.com