Monday, July 11, 2011

Making do with less

I built a computer for the first time in at least a year last week.

I bought parts for a very small and cheap computer. It's an Intel Atom D525 motherboard based computer. It's my first ITX build. The computer is the size of shoebox.

To save money I used RAM from my Macbook Pro (I upgraded the memory from 4 gigs to 8 gigs  a while back). I did buy a 40 GB Intel SSD and a 2 TB Western Digital Green drive for storage. I was going to go with just the SSD to have a computer with zero moving parts, but the constant reading and writing to the SSD from the security software worried me. It's still a nearly silent computer as the CPU has only a passive (no fan) heat sink.

I installed the security camera software and had it up and running in under an hour. My next task will be monitoring CPU usage to see if it can handle being a media server as well.

With Pandora I use my Zune HD less and less these days. Kelli has given up on her Zune HD and uses just Pandora. I cancelled the subscription to my Zune pass which ends August 7th. It will be the first time I will be without unlimited Zune music in 3+ years.

Once Zune is gone the computer that I use to load up the Zunes will quickly become unnecessary and wasteful of power. Right now it fills up the Zunes in addition to downloading podcast to serve to the Zune and our TV via the Xbox 360. The computer is also a host for tons of content (movies and TV shows) that we watch via the 360.

I'm hoping the new computer can serve up media as well. If not then I will think long and hard about how to move forward. The new computer uses less than 1/5th of the power the current media computer consumes. I could build another similar computer and craigslist/eBay the parts of the media computer. All in the name of being green....and simplifying my network.