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. In general terms, PCs which can play recently-released computer games are recommended. The basic course material is now mainly available online via our data management system (you can also dynamically download a PDF version) or via static PDF files for a few Units.

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. 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.