Open Dental Forum

Hi all!!! I've been a long time lurker and have finally decided to get off my arse and get my office converted over to OD. I've got a couple of questions for you all and would highly appreciate all of your thoughts and opinions on the following.

1. I will be buying a new computer for the front desk, initially I will be using this computer both as a workstation and "server". I will be slowly upgrading the office and bringing in workstations into the operatories, but I would like to start by just having OD at the front desk and also my private office for charting and treatment notes. Does win 8 work running OD? Has anyone tried a new install onto a new win 8 computer? Would I be better off going with a computer that has win 7 pro? I've been playing around on the Dell website and it looks like I still could get a dell optiplex line of "bussiness/enterprise" computer with win 7 pro preloaded. Does it even matter that I go with a 'bussiness class" computer or would a consumer brand work just as well? I'm seeing a sale on costco for a dell XPS 8500 computer w/ no monitor for $899.00 http://www.costco.com/Dell-XPS-8500-Des ... 10262.html. Do you guys think this computer will be good enough for my needs or overkill? I must admit I love computers and I also love costco so thats why I'm really tempted to buy this computer, but I thought I would do a quick check here to see what people thought.


2. So my office currently is using a very very old dental PMS, I believe its dental mac version 3.9.1 it's running on an even older apple "power machintosh 4400/200". It does not have a CD burner on it or attached to it. There is a Zip disk which I
I use to back up the data every night. I've talked with a few people in the conversion department and it seems that I need to some how get my PMS data onto a CD or DVD or some sorts. I have no idea how to go about doing this any suggestions??? I can't seem to find anything thats gonna be compatible for my old fart computer. I mainly would like to have the the patient info/insurance info and the treatment ledger ported over as I feel that it would save me the headache of manually entering all the info over again and I would be able to look back into the past to check on previous treatment rendered. Were currently only using dental mac as a scheduler and the ledger for payments both insurance and patient co-pays. Were currently not using e-claims or writing any sort of notes into Dental Mac.


3. Should I even concern myself with entering the old PMS data or just start over from scratch? I don't even know how good the data on my backups are, I'm just thinking it might be garbage in/garbage out... If thats the case I would much rather just such it up and manually reenter everything into the computer....although I would prefer not to do that b/c that would be a major PIA if you know what I mean

Thanks

Ben Tsaur

Hey Ben,

Phil Doan here. UOP '05!

Anyway, stick to cheapy computers knowing you'll be replacing them every few years. Dell has Inspirons for $400, i3 processors. Get them with the addon card for dual monitor setup for the frontdesk. Get the same exact computer (but this time add more RAM, at least 4 GB) for the server. Read up on how to do a virtual server (search the forums for howto.)

Talk to the OD conversion team about what your expectations are vs what's possible. They would just log into your old server, locate and upload your database, convert to OD database, and then set you up. They probably don't need any of your backup files.