First off, can I say many *many* thanks for the donations, which have totalled around about (allowing for the dollar exchange rate) £239.40. (Actually, £214.40 plus a guitar case, but that's not exactly relevant).
So, as I'm sure you all want to know where your money's going:
The original plan was going to be to buy a budget 1U rackmount case from Scan.co.uk, and populate it with a reasonably powerful CPU, big HD, etc etc - once they actually had all the bits in stock at the same time, and I actually had some free time to build it. Likely cost around £300 total.
However, last week, Anne made me aware that her vet practice's big NT server was surplus to requirements qua server, and could I turn it into a workstation? Well, I could, but it would be a criminal waste. GigaByte motherboard, Athlon XP2000+, UNUSED Promise hardware RAID onboard, roomy case, 20GB HD, lots of cooling. A considerably better box than I could afford new, even contributing a goodly chunk myself. So...
New estariol will be said machine, with the addition of 2 x120GB drives (as a mirrored RAID), 512MB of RAM, and a DVD+/-R/RW for network backups (total cost around £180): Anne's practice's price for the server will be a new workstation built on an ASuS Terminator2 barebones machine (total cost about £140, since I can scavenge up a spare HD and CD-ROM for it from the parts bin).
So, as I'm sure you all want to know where your money's going:
The original plan was going to be to buy a budget 1U rackmount case from Scan.co.uk, and populate it with a reasonably powerful CPU, big HD, etc etc - once they actually had all the bits in stock at the same time, and I actually had some free time to build it. Likely cost around £300 total.
However, last week, Anne made me aware that her vet practice's big NT server was surplus to requirements qua server, and could I turn it into a workstation? Well, I could, but it would be a criminal waste. GigaByte motherboard, Athlon XP2000+, UNUSED Promise hardware RAID onboard, roomy case, 20GB HD, lots of cooling. A considerably better box than I could afford new, even contributing a goodly chunk myself. So...
New estariol will be said machine, with the addition of 2 x120GB drives (as a mirrored RAID), 512MB of RAM, and a DVD+/-R/RW for network backups (total cost around £180): Anne's practice's price for the server will be a new workstation built on an ASuS Terminator2 barebones machine (total cost about £140, since I can scavenge up a spare HD and CD-ROM for it from the parts bin).