The Server

What's not to like about a new computer. They're fast, they're new and they are what you make of them. This one is the all singing, all dancing, fastest box I could afford at the time without missing a mortgage payment. So, what is it?

It's a Pentium III 800EB. That's an 800MHz chip with the 133MHz front-side bus. The original motherboard was an ABit VH6 with the VIA chipset, 4X AGP, a couple of ISA slots and 5 or so PCI slots. It's a nice board that comes complete with an ATA66 IDE controller. I don't expect to be upgrading any time soon and that's just fine. Unfortunately, the VH6 died of capacitor failure in the fall of '03 so now I'm running it with a Soyo TISU board. The original HDD was a 20Gb, 7200RPM ATA/66 Fujitsu unit which did what I asked it to do until I traded it off for another, faster and larger HDD. The video card is a Palit Daytona with the NVIDIA RIVA TNT/2 chipset and 64Mb of RAM. It does a nice job and it was pretty inexpensive for what it is. Nowadays it's darn near underwhelming, but it's not given me much trouble since the start. I'm running it in 4X AGP mode and although I've had a bit of trouble with its drivers and my OS, it all seems to be working fine now. I'm running an Intel PRO 100+ PCI Fast Ethernet card for the necessary networking stuff, and I'm using the built-in Crystal Audio chips for sound. Not too bad, either.

Seeing that RAM is so cheap, I bought a 256Mb stick to go with the 128Mb stick already there. Nearly 400Mb of RAM is nice. I'm no longer getting nastygrams from the OS saying it's out of RAM. That's nice. Actually, before the switchover to the Soyo board, I had it running with a Gig of RAM. That's very nice. I've also picked up an LG cd burner. It's nice. I see that instead of finding elegant ways to keep from burning "coasters" LG has seen fit to take the brutal but simple way of providing 8Mb of cache on board the CD burner. It works for me.

The burner has seen a lot of work backing up my website and burning MP3's by the album load. It keeps my HDD needs at a minimum when I can just cut 650Mb and be done with it. It's neat.

As for monitors, I salvaged this 15" jobbie from the scrap heap. I fixed its cold solder joint in its power jack and now it's going to be here for a while. Yes, 15" is pretty small, especially when I have a 19" monitor at work. This isn't work. I have to keep telling myself this.

As for the OS, I'm running Windows 2000 (well, I was... Now I'm running something else). No, there aren't any good reasons to run it at home, except for the fact that it doesn't crash. I used to have to reinstall Windows 98 about every three months or so because it would start to crash. The crashing was usually brought on by a game that it didn't like, or some other software or driver related issue, but that still doesn't excuse the fact that it was about as stable as drunk on a log and board set. I don't like Windows 98, and I try to avoid it as much as possible. Anyway, Windows 2000 rocks for its stability. I'd like for there to be at least some games available for it, but no games equals much work getting done. Besides, I do most of my gaming on my Handspring Visor.

I like Windows 2000 because it is stable. I like the way the interface feels as user friendly as Windows 98, yet I have no worries about when it's going to crash next. I like the fact I can run as many instances of programs as I wish and it still doesn't blink. I really like the fact that I really didn't have to do much of anything to get this box configured. The OS did it all by itself. Plug and Play really works with Windows 2000. The downside is that I'll have to stop saying Plug and Pray. There are a couple of other downsides to Windows 2000. The first and probably the most annoying thing is that there isn't any games being written for it. (I was wrong on that one...) That really sucks. I have this handy dandy computer and I do NOT want to make a Windows 98 partition on my HDD just to play stupid games. The other downsides are that it's butt-expensive and the new interfaces take a lot of getting used to. Other than that, it's definitely thumbs up.

November, 2002

I've acquired a bunch of stuff to build a new box, so this one's being promoted to Master File Server. Since we're moving to Windows 2000 at work, I figured it would be a good thing to run Win2k Server here at home. It's been an education. Active Directory is still kind of fuzzy to me, but I'll deal. I've played with DHCP, DNS, more DHCP, BootP, SMB, Mac printing and various other time sinks. Overall, I still like Windows 2000. I think it can be needlessly complex on occasion, but it is still pretty damn handy.

In the transition, it's gained 2 hard drives at 30 and 40 Gig a piece. It's also lost its DVD drive and TV card, but it has gained a second ethernet card.

It's indulgent, but what the hell. It'll do the trick for quite some while now.

December, 2004

I edited the above to update the story of my server box. Here's the setup as of today: PIII 800, 512Mb RAM, 1x120Gb ATA/133 7200rpm 8Mb cache HDD (file system), 1x40Gb ATA/100 7200rpm HDD (system), 2xIntel 10/100 PCI NIC, a DVD burner and a CD drive, an Adaptec 2940 SCSI card with an internal DDS3 tape drive connected to it and the same Riva TNT video card. It's running 2003 Server presently, but that could change.