[Eeglablist] script example, to extract epochs?

[Robin Stubbs]

This has been a great discussion because I assumed my problems with matlab were possibly
unique. 

I have a beginners question which is what is the hardware and software setup mostly
likely to succeed?  (we have very large eeg files for example 8 hrs * 16 channels) for
which I'd like to do some spectral analyses. (not 16 eeg channels but I fail to have a slick way
to remove the non-eeg channels from the edf files. I need a program where step one is not
load the entire thing into memory. Actually I was working on a program to do this myself but
ran out of inspiration because I was not having much success in getting eeglab to work anyway.) 

Suffice it say a person isn't loading such an edf file into eeglab on 32 bit windows 2003 with 4 G of memory :-)  [btw I did disable dep 
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/875352
as that can be a significant program-killer on 2003 in particular in my experience but that doesn't keep matlab from crashing. Anyone running anything on windows should disable dep
and turn off antivirus/antispam programs etc. Did I miss anything?]

(BTW I'm not saying eeglab is the problem here. I also was hugely unsuccessful running a commercial spectral analysis program on this configuration also and matlab crashed like crazy.) I am surprised because I used to use matlab back in the 90's on solaris and it was very stable. What went wrong? If it doesn't like windows, I can run any version of unix it would care for but I'd love to know what version it actually likes ahead of time. Or at least an educated guess? 

So what is the ideal system to run matlab and thus eeglab?

1. what operating system is best (including 32 bit vs 64)
2. what processor configuration and/or chipset (including bitness and what cores and
 whatever else details and most of all how much memory?
3. what is the best version of matlab? I was using 2009 (whatever subversion is most recent) and that seemed not a good choice. I started with 2008 and that was awful.

In case it is not known what would be the ideal platform for eeglab, because maybe we could
be so unlucky that matlab didn't run particularly well anywhere, what do the eeglab developer's use?