General hardware requirements: What do you need physically besides VFP to deploy a solution?

This section might be the most difficult section we write in this book because there are no absolutes when it comes to determining the hardware necessary to run a Visual FoxPro application. Microsoft has specified the minimum requirements for the development version of Visual FoxPro, but this is not the same set of requirements our runtime applications require (see Table 1 ).

VFP 8 Minimum

Pentium-class

Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000 Service Pack 2 or later, and Windows XP

64 megabytes (MB) of RAM minimum; 128 MB or higher recommended

Super VGA 800 X 600 or higher-resolution monitor with 256 colors (High color 16-bit recommended)

Mouse or compatible pointing device

We establish our minimum requirements, which may be different than the actual computers our customers use in the production environment. Establishing this minimum covers us if the customer expresses concerns with performance issues with our applications. Our workstation recommendations are broken down to three configurations:

• Marginal Performance - 450 Mhz Pentium, 64 Mb RAM (Minimum)

• Mid range machine - 1.2 Ghz Pentium, 128 Mb RAM

• High end machine - 2.0 Ghz Pentium or more 256 Mb RAM or more

All workstations should be connected to a 100 MB/S ethernet network, using 100 Mbit Ethernet Network Interface Cards, and should have free disk space on the local drive equal to at least 15% of the local drive size or 500 megabytes, whichever is greater.

You might see your applications run on computers weaker than the workstation specified for marginal performance. We have seen our Visual FoxPro 8 applications run with acceptable performance on a 266Mhz computer with 64MB of memory. This particular application is using a client-server database on the backend. Much of the heavy duty processing is run using stored procedures so performance benefited from a well-configured server.

You might have noticed our high-end machine is not peaked out with the latest and greatest processor offering from Intel and our low-end machine might be a little higher than what our customers have in their offices. The ranges specified are guidelines. You will recognize many factors that determine what the real minimums are for the workstations. For instance, how many other applications are run on the machine while your applications run, whether the application is running on a network, whether anti-virus software is running on the machine, and the intensity of the processing performed by the application. If the workstation is used for reporting and the reporting performs numerous calculations and queries millions of records from a Visual FoxPro database, a higher power machine loaded with 512MB of memory might be best. If a workstation is using an application based on a SQL Server database (located on the server) and is used for data entry transactions, a lower end machine might work well.

Other hardware that can impact your deployed applications will include a server (file, database, and Web servers alike), Internet connections for Web connected applications (dialup vs. broadband), CD-ROM and DVD burners, scanners , barcode readers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and backup solutions. Printers are also very important. Laser printers for report intensive applications, color printers for graphics and presentations, and label printers need to be considered . A good monitor that supports higher resolution and higher color settings without eye strain can never be discounted. If your application interacts with the hardware you need to evaluate how well Visual FoxPro works with the technology and determine if there are problems with integration and deployment of the technology.