Manifold System™ works best with Microsoft '98 or NT 4.0, 150Mhz or greater Pentium, and (depending on data set sizes) 64Mb of RAM. In a pinch the system will work with as little as 32Mb of RAM and will even perform many tasks on a fast 486. Given the low cost of RAM in modern times, it is a shame not to have 128Mb or even 192Mb.   Manifold System will work with limited palettes and less than 800 x 600 resolution; however, this is very tedious. If you use lower resolution or lower color palettes, you will have to reposition toolbars and be limited in color choices.

Graphics cards are strongly urged to have OpenGL hardware capability if 3D View Studio or any other 3D software is in your future. Even cheapo $50 clone cards created in the last six months will work about a thousand times faster than premium cards sold for over $200 just two years ago.  Do yourself a favor and get a recent graphics card.  You'll be amazed at the effect it will have on your Quake technique.

We recommend Windows '98 over Windows '95, and in turn Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 over Windows '98 for use with Manifold System.   Although use with Win'95 will in general be quite satisfactory, you should be aware that there are a few limitations compared to '98 or 'NT.  Each Microsoft operating system has incorporated many improvements and bug fixes to previous versions of Windows.  In addition, NT and 2000 provide performance improvements made possible by better memory management.  Manifold will take advantage of these improvements.

Why is a Microsoft Internet Browser Required?

Manifold uses a large variety of standard Microsoft facilities, some of which have been implemented by Microsoft in the form of dll libraries. Depending on the particular release of Windows you have, some of these dll libraries can only be guaranteed to be available for use by Manifold if you have at some point installed a Microsoft Internet Browser such as Internet Explorer 3.02 or Internet Explorer 4.0.   In theory, Manifold could upgrade your Windows system with the correct dlls even if you do not have a Microsoft browser installed.  To accomplish this, Microsoft provides system dlls to developers like in redistributable form so that applications may automatically upgrade the OS.  However, certain dependencies are so complex that it is risky for a third party developer to attempt to upgrade Windows in certain areas.  The safest method is to install one of the Microsoft browsers and thus let Microsoft itself do all the updating to its own operating system. Microsoft has made sure that its IE browser installation scripts will correctly update the operating system, no matter what combination of applications or dll upgrades have previously been done.

Note that you do not actually have to use Microsoft's browser if you do not wish to.  It is OK if you use Opera or Mosaic or AOL/Netscape or another browser as your default browser, since merely installing the Microsoft browser brings all required .dlls and other files onto your machine. 

We would like to emphasize that we see this issue as a purely technical matter having nothing whatsoever to do with the current political fuss over browser installations.   Our requirement of an IE installation is simply the most expedient way we have found to assure the correct installation of all networking facilities in all possible combinations of Microsoft systems released in the last four years.  Stating the requirement in this way allows us and our customers to exploit the massive amount of tech support Microsoft has invested into resolving upgrade issues within its own products.   Exploiting Microsoft's investments is, of course, one reason why Manifold is so much less expensive than UNIX GIS products.

Other Notes

If you routinely work with very large data sets (50 to 100 megabytes) in either Manifold System or Manifold Database Commander, you should invest in fast hard disks, lots of RAM, and a dual-processor machine running NT. The system has been developed and tested using a wide variety of clone motherboards on Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II and Pentium III machines running up to four processors under NT and one processor in Win'95.  The current development environment is a mix of Windows NT 4.0 and the most recent Windows 2000 release.

Manifold products are available only on standard architecture PC ("Wintel") machines running Microsoft Windows '95, Windows '98, Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000. We have no plans for ports to other architectures. See our Straight Talk on Software Pricing white paper for information on how this policy makes it possible to provide such a terrific value in software.

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