As of Version 20:

• Microsoft Windows® operating system: Windows 10.
• 1 GB of RAM
• 250 MB hard disk space
• 500 MHz processor
• For SnapMaps: A recent Web browser
• Some reports require Microsoft Excel installed

We recommend at least a quad-core processor for SnapPlus to perform at optimal capacity, because there is a noticeable performance boost for running RUSLE2 erosion model.

While SnapPlus will run at the 1-GB minimum memory, 4 GB or more is recommended. SnapPlus will use about 250 MB of disk for the application and supporting files. As with all applications, a solid-state disk (SSD) noticeably improves performance, especially for large farms. Your farm databases will be a minimum of 200 KB per farm, with the size dependent on the number of fields, applications and the number of rotation years your are planning. Every time you open a farm in SnapPlus a backup of your farm is made and stored in an Archive sub-folder located in the same folder as your farm.  This folder may be purged from time to time to free up disk space.

Screen Resolution

SnapPlus is designed for a minimum screen resolution of 1024 by 768 pixels. You can try adjusting your screen resolution if your hardware supports it. Right click on the desktop and select “Properties” from the popup menu. A “Display Properties” dialog will appear. Choose the “Settings” tab, and adjust the “Screen Resolution” control to “1024 by 768 pixels”. Some computers may need to be rebooted before the setting will take effect.

If you can’t set your screen resolution that high, then the program will work best if its window is maximized. At this time, SnapPlus works best with “Large fonts” turned OFF.

Finally, if you are having problems with the table grid rows in SnapPlus being distorted (especially on the cropping screen) or windows spontaneously minimizing, it could be because of another display setting problem. See Display Issues in Windows 8 and 10 for more info on what’s going on and how to work around it.

Web Browser

SnapMaps will work with almost any recent Web browser, it has been tested with Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Microsoft Edge. Note that Internet Explorer 9 and earlier will not work with SnapMaps.

Using SnapPlus on Other Operating Systems

Because SnapPlus uses the RUSLE2 soil-loss model from NRCS, which is only available on Windows, it has to have a Windows environment to run. If you have a Mac OS X or Linux system, there are ways to accomplish this:

• VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop: These commercial virtualization applications let you install and run a licensed copy of Windows in a “virtual machine” on your Mac. Two of the SnapPlus developers do their everyday work with Fusion and recommend it. The virtual machine can run SnapPlus with as little as 2 GB of reserved RAM, though more will yield improved performance.
• Oracle VM VirtualBox: This is an open-source alternative to the Fusion and Desktop applications described above. Free to download and run on OS X and Linux, though a licensed copy of Windows is still required. Tested and known to run SnapPlus and SnapMaps under Windows 10.
• Wine emulator: Designed to run Windows programs directly, without a virtualization “sandbox”, on Linux and OS X. The SnapPlus development staff have not yet succeeded in installing and running SnapPlus on it, however.