Minimum Computing Requirements

Prospective students will need regular access to a computer (see below) and frequent (at least twice-weekly) access to the Internet: Dial-in access at Swinburne is extremely limited: students in the Graduate Certificate of Science in Astronomy are expected to arrange their own Internet access.

This course has been optimized to run on Pentium III (500 MHz or greater, with at least 128 Mb of RAM) machines running Windows 98/2000/XP with a CDROM drive. In general terms, PCs which can play recently-released computer games are recommended. The basic course material has been developed using the extensive animation features of PowerPoint. You can view the course material using your own version of PowerPoint or the free PowerPoint Viewer which we distribute with the course content CDROMs.

Although the course material has been optimized to run on PCs, it will also run on Apple Macintosh machines. Your machine should at least be running Macintosh OSX. It is possible to view the course material on Mac OS9 machines, however this is not recommended or supported by the SAO Helpdesk. We also recommend obtaining your own copy of Microsoft Office for Macintosh OSX to view the PowerPoint course material. While we supply the free OS9 PowerPoint Viewer from Microsoft on the course CDROMs, we do not recommend using this due to memory limitations of this application. At most, one or two of our extra custom simulations will at present not run on Macintosh machines, so Mac users should ensure that they have occasional access to a PC.