unCubeme

I recently just wrote a  post about why I switched from my engineering based PC to a Windows Home Server PC. I will now explain what I did to the little dell and how to maximize usage to fit your server needs. In the previous article I mentioned that I was looking at the Atom based Eee box, but wasn’t too sure of the performance of the device. I also wasn’t looking to spend too much money therefore I researched other PCs. I always look for business based PCs because you can find them off lease for very cheap and they are very functional PCs. They usually lack the media capabilities but are still really reliable.  I came across the SX280 on a craigslist listing and then did a little research and found a bunch of them on eBay for really cheap. This fits the form factor I was looking for, because I wanted to have this machine hooked up to my TV.

The SX280 I bought was a P4 HT 3.0Ghz, 1GB Ram (2 slots), 200GB HD, CD Rom drive, all that for $125. The first thing I did right away, even before deciding to go to WHS was to upgrade the Ram, I bought 2 x 1GB Ram sticks. This frees up valuable memory space to allow processes to contiue without beeing needed swaped to disk under heavy load. I shop at Microcenter which they have sales all the time. If you don’t want to shop there then I would go to New Egg or eBay. I probably could have found one on ebay with 2GB Ram or more. I would estimate the cost for memory at $25 so now our total is $150. Replacing the memory is super easy and does not require any screwdrivers, the top of the case pops of with the twist of knob.

The next thing I upgraded was the HD. The problem with the SX280 is there is only 1 HD slot and for me that was enough for the amount of data i was going to back up. I bought a 500Gb HD from Microcenter for $59 and replaced it. This takes screwdriver, but it is also easy to replace. I bought an external usb enclosure for the previous HD. With this I can have the 200GB HD connected and use that to backup certain sections of the 500GB HD.

Currently I already have a wireless keyboard and mouse, but eventually I am going to purchase a media center remote control and a wireless keyboard with a touchpad built in. This will provide the media center experience when you have the computer connected to your tv. I want to provide an experience in which that I do not need to use a keyboard when connected to a tv. I would like to use the computer as like I use my PS3 that provides a nice easy user interface to media files and such. To do real computer with it, I can just remote into the machine.

The SX280 comes with a DVI output which displays nicely, but does not fill my 42″ DLP TV. Also, when I installed Windows 7 and Vista on the machine to play around with, it does not support Windows Aero. For this I would like to upgrade the video card to be able to handle displaying videos. Since this pc does not have any PCI or AGP slots there is not option to upgrade the video card internally. There are external USB video cards that will support Windows Aero and provide nice video display experience.

 The SX280 uses a laptop optical drive that is hot swapable. The nice thing is that it uses the same drive that you get with the Latitude series. Therefore I had an extra DVD-RW drive that I could replace the bone stock CD-ROM drive that the PC came with. Once again, you could probably find one on ebay that does have one already. I’m not going to use this to play DVDs but, it is nice to have a DVD drive over a CD drive.

 For all of you that don’t want to shell out the money to purchase Windows Home Server right away you can order a Free 120 day trial from Microsoft. This is actually what I’m using before I dump the $100 into the OS. When you install the OS it will not upgrade from XP or Vista and it will delete all data off your hard drive so back up the software before hand. Once the OS is set up, I then plugged in the USB and set it up to backup the server. One great feature of this is that it will automatically back up you client pcs. So I have a daily backup of my laptop now.

For the media software, there are work arounds to install Windows Media Player 11. To easily watch Hulu videos I have installed  MyMediaPlayer by Paul Yanez. This is a really nice interface to basically the Hulu.com site to easily browse episodes. To replace Windows Media Center I have downloaded and installed MediaPortal which has a similar look and feel.

Finally, I feel that I’m fully using the potential of this little PC. When I’m logged into the PC I can use it a Media Center, but in the background it is a Home Server that will back up my other PCs and store all my documents on a centrally located machine. It can even be configured to access the PC anywhere with proper router support.

Let us know what you guys think, or tell us about what you guys use your Media Center or Windows Home Server.