USER MANUAL

May 2006

By

John Arran,

Roger Barnfather,

Sean Handley,

Karim Kanso,

Lee Meader,

Chris Usher

 

User Manual for Spectre

Introduction

            Welcome to the User Manual for the Chemical Mass Spectrometer Program.  This short guide aims to enable you, the user to be able to effectively and efficiently be able to run, install and use this program we have created.   This program intends to give its user an efficient and usable interface to the problem calculating Mass Spectrums for given Isotopes/Compounds, taking in source data from an internal file and outputting the information in a readable graph layout. 

 

Hardware Requirements

Suitable for Windows XP and Linux Distributions

Pentium 166 MHz or higher

64 MB Memory required

56K Dial-up Modem or higher (Required)

Access to an unZip program.         

 

Accessing Spectre from Web Browser

We have designed Spectre so that it can be used on all platforms and Operating Systems and all the user needs to have access to is a simple web browser. 

This is the address for the Spectre website where this program can be downloaded, after this has been entered into the address bar, you should then see the web page displayed below:

 

After you have got to this point if you click the “Download” button, you should then see the following dialog box:

 

This however obviously depends on the browser that you are currently using.  You should then click on the “Save to Disk” option.  This will save Spectre as a .zip file to somewhere predetermined onto your hard disk.  You should then go to that folder on your hard disk and unzip the folder using an unzip program.  I am going to show how to unzip Spectre using the WinRAR program.  However this is not compulsory to unzip Spectre using WinRAR, it can also be done using the default program in Windows XP.

 

Unzipping Spectre using WinRAR

Once you have this screen all you have to do is to click the “Extract to” option.  Then you should specify where you would like it extracted to.

Running Spectre

In the Spectre folder which has just been extracted you should now see the following layout.

You should then click the “run” MS-DOS or the “run.sh” file and this will execute the program and will show the program as follows.

 

From then the program is pretty self-explanatory but I have included a short guide for using Spectre to display Mass Spectrums and amending database file.

 

Using Spectre

When you are faced with this screen then this is the User Interface for Spectre.  At this part of the user interface you can enter in a number of different elements and display the Mass Spectrums for that Isotope or Compound. 

 

However if you click on the tab named “Isotope Database” then you will then be faced with the screen right:

 

Here the user can add new data, amend previous data and view data about all the different elements and their relative isotopes.