A Frustrating Journey
When I started looking at a Home Server replacement back in October the plan was to get some new hardware and transition to it when Vail was released. Then Vail was gutted when when Microsoft removed drive extender and it became just another OS with nothing unique, at least not for me. Luckily this system build is flexible and I have options. In it short life it's already run Windows Home Server Vail and Ubuntu 10.04.1. Read the rest »
Having just built a new Windows Home Server and doing some PC upgrades I’ve updated and refreshed my PC monitoring utilities and resources. These are links for tools and sites I find useful. Read the rest »
After upgrading my hard drive to an SSD drive and seeing the performance boost I was eager to on with my next planned system upgrade and replace the video card. Unfortunately my mini-ATX motherboard wasn’t going to handle a full-size video card due to the the SATA ports being too close to the card slots. So I’d need a new motherboard before proceeding. Since I was planning some major upgrades by year end it didn’t make sense to get a motherboard for the same CPU and go through all that work for a couple of months. So it was time to accelerate the upgrades and basically build a new system. Read the rest »
October comes to a close here in the States (and a few other countries) things have been moving along on the quest. There was a new OS, but after installing Ubuntu 10.10 to VirtualBox I haven’t used it very much. Instead I’ve spent most of my time working on my system builds. This past month was mostly about Vail and a new Windows Home Server system build. At the end of the month I started work on my PC upgrade. Read the rest »
I have most of the parts in house for my WHS System build and I started putting things together and testing Windows Home Server V2 (Vail). I talked about the the case I picked and plans to try out the EasySATA docks. The good news is I ordered the docks from Amazon so it was easy to return them. The bad news is it was downhill from there. Read the rest »
started out by using a couple online power calculators in order to get an idea about the size power supply I needed. My requirements are pretty basic, the biggest power user would be the 12 drive capacity I wanted. Beyond that it was a single CPU with 4 sticks of memory on a regular desktop motherboard. I figured a simple memory card and an additional SATA controller. The Thermaltake Power Supply Calculator is where I started and it estimated I needed 477 watts. The Newegg Power Supply Calculator is more conservative (but simpler to use) and even though it could only go to 8 drives it suggested 496 watts. So I needed a minimum of a 500 watt power supply. Read more to find out what I picked. Read the rest »
I wrote about the Cooler Master RAF32 case that I ordered for my next system build earlier this week. Now I’ll go into the motherboard I plan to use and why. I already have the motherboard in hand, purchased earlier so I could take advantage of a discount. I just placed the order for the CPU and memory. Read on for information and why I picked this motherboard, cpu and RAM combination. Read the rest »
After starting my evaluation of Windows Home Server Vail on my test server I became more eager to get going on my next system build, a new home server that will run Vail (Windows Home Server v2) once it’s released. I’ve been researching the parts I think I’ll want for the server and decided it was time to start buying them. I made a decision on the case and placed the order this weekend. Read on to see why I picked the Cooler Master HAF 932 RC-932-KKN1-GP. Read the rest »
I’ve been thinking about the PC builds and upgrades I’ll want to be doing in the near future. Now’s as good as time as any to get some ideas and start looking for sales and buying opportunities. I'm looking at a new Windows Home Server for Vail, a new or upgraded windows desktop, and a home theater PC. Read the rest »
I needed a low cost rig that could be used for hardware testing. My immediate need was for hard disk testing. This is the hardware I bought for that purpose. Now that the immediate need passed I installed Windows 7 Premium so I could benchmark it and take it for a spin. Read the rest »