New beginnings, new gadgets

Posted by Norm on April 2nd, 2007 filed in General, Technology

Seeing as I am getting four brand new housemates from the 1st July and I am moving rooms I now have the perfect excuse for thinking up some new toys, gadgets, space savers etc for next academic year.

We have big plans for a home network, 3.5 of us will be computing students next year, so I am acquiring a new computer so that I can a) have a linux machine that I can practice on and b) there is going to be some spare space for extra hard drives and other network paraphenalia. To this end I need to put together a list of stuff for my new computer - I have a case, PSU, fan, motherboard and a hodge podge of hard drives, optical drives and other bits and bats. The computer I have acquired was originally an AMD 688Mhz, with 20Gb hard drive, 128MB RAM, I seem to remember my brother putting a 64MB nVidia graphics card in there and on board sound. There is a prob a network card in it. I was planning on putting one or two new, larger hard drives in there, but apart from that I don’t know where to start to get it up to some sort of spec. I basically need it for running linux and as a storage system. Any ideas or suggestions welcome.

There is also a new stereo system, a new television, possibly Sky TV and i am definitely looking at some kind of back-up storage system. I don’t know whether a couple of large external hard drives are the way forward, or just use DVD’s - again advice would be useful.

I am also seriously looking into a new laptop, as portable as possible but with adequate specs so that I can use it for a variety of things like media, uni work and the odd bit of WoW/mobile blogging.


4 Responses to “New beginnings, new gadgets”

  1. Chris Worfolk Says:
    April 2nd, 2007 at 1:01 pm

    The computer spec should run something like Xubuntu, I’m running Ubuntu on 64mb ram though it’s the server edition - no GUI.

    I wouldn’t use DVDs for backup if it can be avoided due to their size, they just don’t have the storage. My new server is going to be RAID-1 all the way so every hard drive is mirrored in case of failure. Doesn’t cater for off-site backups though so the plan isn’t totally finalised.

    A low spec laptop should do most of the things you want with exception of WoW/gaming in general. You’ll probably need a a new portable (portable but expensive) or an old desktop replacement (cheaper but not portable).

  2. Norm Says:
    April 2nd, 2007 at 4:27 pm

    Cheers. Well I take delivery of my new desktop next week, so might steal your expertise in speccing it up and sorting out a linux installation.

  3. Kieran O'Shea Says:
    April 3rd, 2007 at 9:38 am

    I never knew you were such a geek Norm ;)

    I’m sure we can sort you out a great computer, network and storage setup. It definitely has to be Linux all the way, especially if you are doing modules in SoC :)

  4. Norm Says:
    April 3rd, 2007 at 12:39 pm

    I am the ultimate geek! I am the kinda geek that pretends that they are cool by being into modern music and being more than competent socially, but I secretly indulge my passion for all things sci-fi and technological.

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