Thinking about upgrading

[mdlbear]

I spent some time last night doing a Debian install on an old panel PC that I rescued from the surplus pile at work, mainly because there were guests in the house who wanted some web browser time, and the spare desktop in the office had been displaced by selkit's shiny new gaming box. There were problems -- I never did get X working at full resolution, and it's noisy as heck. Most likely I'll gut it and replace the computer part with my 500MHz miniITX board. Meanwhile the dual-boot machine that used to occupy that spot has been moved to the flower_cat's desk to replace the similar Fry's box that died on her. So I've been thinking about upgrades for a while.

Right now the only acceptably-fast machine in the house is harmony, which is currently in the bedroom serving as my recording machine. Even there, it's a little wimpy for editing. My main workstation would work better as a thin client. So there are now three upgrade projects on the table:

1. Double the disk on the fileserver. I have everything I need for this one except maybe a good time to do it, but fortunately I'm the only heavy Linux user; the others won't care except when they're reading their email.
2. Upgrading the router. This involves juggling both the new and old DSL lines and my DNS and mail configurations, so it's not at all trivial. And unlike the file server it's mission-critical for the house.
3. Upgrading the workstation. I'd be tempted to move harmony to an Antec NSK2400 case and put the new workstation in the P150, except that the '2400 only takes microATX motherboards. Oops. So I'll probably go into an Antec SOLO, which is basically a black P150 without the power supply. Those, I have, including a nice, quiet Vantec 350N. I'll probably go for an AMD 64X2 of some sort. The plan is to see what Fry's has on sale tomorrow. I don't expect to spend more than $500 on the box, and probably closer to $300.

None of which is helping me get the album done, but it's getting there.