Fruddled Gruntbugglies

I’ve decided to do a bit of server shuffling this weekend. I’m basically going to do a case/motherboard swap of concerto, my 700mhz server at the office, with my 450mhz server at home. That will give me a little bit more CPU at home to run stuff like GnuCash and OpenOffice inside my VNC desktop. The motherboards in the two boxes are very similar, so this should be a really easy swap… no new kernels needed, etc. Ironically, this will put concerto back on the original hardware that ran it, which should more than suffice for what it runs now, namely Apache, MySQL and Samba. One difference between the two motherboards is that [I believe] the 700mhz board does not have an ISA slot. That means I won’t be able to use my really-old ISA 56K modem card at home any more. I don’t think I’ll miss it, though, and if I do, PCI modem cards are cheap.

Yesterday I ordered a Western Digital “My Book” 750G external USB hard drive from newegg.com. I need something portable to use for backups of important documents, digital photos, videos, music, etc. The sale price was $175, including free shipping. That works out to just over 23 cents per gigabyte… amazing. And a few years from now, that’s probably going to seem expensive.

Of course, to get any kind of transfer speed out of a USB hard drive, USB 2.0 is a necessity. My old machines only support USB 1.1 on-board, so I also needed to buy a USB 2.0 PCI card. These are amazingly cheap now too. Grand total of $9.99 – $7.00 mail-in rebate, or $2.99. Technology is a funny thing. Compared to 10 years ago, the price of milk and gas seems sky-high nowadays.  But that same 10 years ago, I paid $3000+ for a 300mhz Pentium-II with an 8 gig hard drive, which seemed unthinkably cutting-edge at the time.  Computers (and electronics for that matter) are cheap, cheap, cheap now by comparison.