System Requirements

In Genius Shop Tools will actually function on a 200Mhz computer with 32MB of RAM, but you will probably go nuts waiting for things to happen. We suggest at least a Pentium III or Celeron 600, 128MB and 1GB of free hard drive space for the best performance. Computers with ATA100+ hard drives and controllers work best.

This software is designed to run on Windows NT 4, 2000 Pro, 2000 Server, XP Home, XP Pro, XP Tablet and Windows Server 2003.  We highly recommend using Windows 2000 or XP because they manage memory, multi-processing and file access are much better than Windows 98/ME.  You will have noticeably better performance with most all applications when using 2000 or XP (provided that you have enough RAM.)

While the Workstation install of Shop Tools does actually work on Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME & Windows NT, we don't support it. 

Whatever operating system you are using, it is critical that you install the latest service packs and security fixes.

For all Windows installations, you will need a minimum of Internet Explorer 5 installed, but we strongly recommend Internet Explorer 6 because IE 5 has some serious security flaws.

Microsoft Office 2000 or higher is required for mail-merge features (printing customer address labels and such.)

In Genius Shop Tools is compatible with Microsoft Terminal Services.
We actually recommend Terminal Services as a viable option for many customers.

Database speed is purely dependent on machine and network speed.  The faster the better.

For stand-alone installations, we recommend having a pretty decent machine.  A Pentium III 600 or faster will do the job nicely. ATA100 drives make huge gains in performance. Considering how in-expensive computers are now, this should not be a problem.

In multi-user installations, your workstations don't have to be real work-horses.  You can use Celeron or Duron machines for this, but will get much better perfomance from something faster. Your database server should be a fast machine (Pentium III 1000) with at least 256MB of RAM and fast hard drives (SCSI is best, ATA100 is good) with lots of free hard drive space.

We recommend 100Mbps ethernet products.  Intel and 3Com work best, but inexpensive products like Netgear and DLink will get the job done.  In Genius Shop Tools will perform just fine on a 10Mbps network provided that it does not have heavy traffic. We have even tested IGST over DSL lines with satisfactory results.