A rather boring post about my home computers

So I bought a new desktop PC off Woot.com back in October.  It was a HP desktop suitable enough for my needs.  I didn't like that it came with Window 8 but also recognized that is the leading-edge OS in the Windows world and I might as well join the avant-garde party.  I could have got a Windows 7 if I had jumped on one quickly enough but by the time I ran it past my fellow geeks the option that gave me the best hardware for cheapest price was gone.  All in all, I'm quite happy with the $400 savings on this one then the custom one I might have built on the HP website.

Before this new PC arrived, I had three desktop PCs that I used for the following purposes. 

• My main desktop, a dell PowerEdge 400SC class PC which I got for $20 at a yard sale in 2009.  I got it to replace the dinosaur Dell (named Orion) that I had been using since 1999.  I threw a copy of XP on it and added the data drive from Orion.   I really only used it for storing emails, some web surfing and blogging. 
• PC that I built in 2007 that was supposed to be an Application Server but I changed jobs and it ended up really being just a glorified storage drive.  I had plans to use it as a NAS but never got around to it.  When Nightingale and I merged households, one of my many time wasting tasks was going through a box of 3.5 inch diskettes and seeing if there was anything of value worth saving.  A few got copied to this machines hard drive.  Alas, somewhere between all the moves, the HD got fried and it won't even spin so I've lost whatever was on it.  I do have redundant copies of most of it, but there's always a chance one file was missed over.  You know, the one with the next great American novel on it, about a vampire who loves a zombie and they go to wizard school or something like that.
   
• A Windows Media Center PC that my in-laws gave us.  It took me a couple days to get all the
  
  malware, spyware and other junk off it and convert it into a clean poor man's Roku that we used at the condo so we could watch a few things online since we didn't have cable.

Anyway, when they were all working they were fine machines and I had geek-visions of re-purposing the machines as media storage, surveillance camera servers, firewall and whatnot.  Alas, it's too much work and we aren't there yet.  Hence the new PC -- this is probably the last traditional desktop I will ever buy because the leading-edge trend is to go tablet.  

So over the last month I've been slowly migrating the data from the old pcs to the new one.   I decided I'd get rid of the App Server and the SBS machines.  I'm keeping the Media Center one because it still a pretty good piece of hardware and it can support my XP apps that I don't want to upgrade.  I put the outlook archive on it.  The only potential issue is that the hard drive makes a lot of noise when it spins.  I don't know if this is because of its age or from all the moving I put the PC through in the last year (condo to new house, basement to attic, to first floor, now to office.)

The final two

On the new HP, I just have my current email on Outlook 2013 -- I was fortunate to be able to purchase Office 2013 for $10 as an additional benefit of my current employer and the fact that Micosoft is ready to move on to Office 365.

I figure another month or so and I will be confident that I can drop these machines -- stripped of their hard drives of course -- off at the recycle center.

I figure if I don't come across it in a month,  I won't likely need it at all.  Yes, I do have a a backup of the HD on an external Maxtor drive, but I'm not convinced everything got copied.  The problem is that I'm using a maxtor that is already very full with other backups so I cannot simply select the copy the entire drive option and for some reason I cannot select or even see certain folders.  I could trouble shoot it but I rally don't want to invest that much effort and energy.   

****************
 Thank you for reading and I hope you will comment below. Here's the part where I beg for stuff because we get paid in likes, shares, re-tweets and feedback. Please also do any and all of the following: Follow Mysteries of Life on Twitter (@MysteriesOLife), Facebook or subscribe via email.

Type your email address in the box and click the "create subscription" button. My list is completely spam free, and you can opt out at any time.