Recommendations for Internet cafe.

  • Thread starter Thread starter Zotin Khuma
  • Start date Start date
General Schvantzkoph said:
I'd up the RAM to 512M, 128M is simply not adequate, 256M is the bare
minimum. For your application the 40G drive is probably OK but it's a
little small by modern standards. A single platter in a current generation
disk drive is 100G, a 40G drive is based on old technology. While the
Athlon XP 2000+ is fine for your application there is hardly any price
difference between a 2000+ and a 2400+, I'd spend the extra US$8 on the
faster processor.

As for software, use Linux don't even consider Windows XP. Linux comes
with everything you need and it also includes a caching proxy server
(Squid), mail servers, DNS servers and ftp servers. Set up one of your
systems as a server using the caching name server and the a DNS server.
You won't have to worry about viruses, which will cripple your Windows
machines, and of course Linux is free so you can spend the US$170 per
machine on more memory. I'd recommend either Mandrake 10.0 or Fedora Core
2. Because you are on dial up it will be really painful to download the
ISOs (although it can be done) so your best bet would be to buy CDROMs
from http://www.linuxcentral.com. The Fedora Core CDs cost US$9, Mandrake
10.1 Community costs $US12. Also I'd download Firefox and use that as the
browser on your systems.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I'll keep your suggestions in mind. I'm also toying with the
idea of a satellite setup. There's a dealer here, but they know zilch
about computers or the internet. The previous dealer sold one unit in
2 years (to a government department) and the present one hasn't made a
single sale in months. They've made a trial installation in another
friend's existing cafe (for free), but they had to send for a
technician from another city. Actually, the cafe's owner, a former
student of mine in electronics, is quite knowledgeable, but they don't
want him to "meddle" with the installation at this point.
 
..... said:
All internet cafe's there still use dialup ? You can't get other forms of
broadband like ISDN or satellite ?
Click to expand...
.....<snip>......

There *is* a satellite system available, but the costs appear
prohibitive for the modest returns expected - US$2500 initially and
something like $1000 per month for a useable subscription plan. For
other factors, please see my reply to General S's post.
 
CBFalconer said:
Very nice. That should allow 1 line per machine for the cafes.
BTW, what country is 'here'?
Click to expand...

India. And as I mentioned before, an isolated state with a small
population (<1 mill) that has little in common with rest of the
country - race, language, religion (100% Christian), culture etc are
all very different from mainstream India.

The nearest large city where I buy all my stuff from is Kolkata
(formerly Calcutta). I have regular suppliers there who usually ship
my order by air within a few hours after I give them a call. But the
market situation is such that, e.g., they don't have anything higher
than an FX5600 or a 2800+ CPU (XP or A64). They claim that the
distributors don't have them and they'd have to send for them from
other cities, and would I care to wait ?

And Oops! that should've been 10 cents/hr for Internet access instead
of 5c. Other figures are correct.
 
For my ISP in hong kong, it's 3c a minute upto maximum of $26 usd per month.
No phone charge.

But nobody uses dial ups anymore and I can claim without research that 80%+
internet users here uses broadband. The price for broadband dropped
significantly for the past year from $30 usd to $10 usd per month unlimited.
Compared to the $26 dial up, peeps would pick the $10 bb package of course.

You can also search up on multilinking the phone lines to get more
bandwidth.
 
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