The senior sysadmin looked at it thoughtfully, then flipped a single switch. Every server in the cabinet went down.
For those who don't wish to dump running servers to test redundant power, I use a 100 Watt light bulb on a christmas flasher and a clamp ammeter. I can see the current wiggle.8 amps at the breaker box to identify the circuit without interrupting power. If both legs in the cabinet are on the same breaker, it's time to investigate further.
Why can't there be legal format conversions? Why can't MS (and other DRM happy companies) release a tool that converts "old" DRMed media to "new" DRMed media...still locked to the same computer.
I don't know about you, but I am no longer using my PC from 5 years ago as it arrived. Windows 98 has been replaced. This breaks DRM files but not MP3 files. Any questions?
Locked to the same computer with it's 5 year or older OS is NOT and option for my music collection. My LP's still play and can be ripped and played on any PC I have or will have. The same is true for my Compact Cassettes and Compact Disc's. This won't be true for any DRM files which is why I don't buy them.
The whole idea that Win98/ME users are going to flock over to Linux on the sole basis that support had ended is a red herring.
I'll bite. I don't think it's a red herring. Users switch because unpatchable systems are sitting ducks online. My kids were using a Windows 98 machine. After the semi annual reformat, reconfigure, install patches, and reinstall apps and drivers changed to a monthly task, I moved it to Ubuntu. I upgraded since from Breezy Badger to Dapper Drake but is wasn't nessary for any degradition in performance.
almost always -- because they're deathly afraid to touch their computers.
Not so in my case. It's the apps stupid. I have a Windows 95 laptop. It has a tiny hard drive and only 72 meg of EDO memory. It's hit it's limit. It does not have a USB port. It does have a real joysitck port with the MIDI MPU port. It runs the piano tutor software. It is not web connected. It is fast enough and new hardware would be an expense as the new hardware on the market does not have MIDI/Joystick ports built in. It does the job just fine thank you. With a 16 bit cardbus NIC it uses my LAN resources just fine including my fileserver and printers. Needless to say this puppy is blocked at the router to the internet. With a built in modem, I hang it on the phone line when I need to recieve a fax. I have a legal copy of WinFax for it.
An upgrade of the OS would downgrade the space in memory for applications.
To paraphrase what my long post could be, the answer is "Its the apps stupid!".
To which I fully agree. I need a stable web browser on a stable OS. That's my Ubuntu box. I need to put together Power Point presentations, that's done on the Win2K laptop. I need to print topo maps for my back country trips and interface waypoints with my GPS, that's my Windows 95 laptop. I need to run tax preperation software, that's on the wife's XP home box.
Note the box for finance is not the box used for general web browsing. A single family PC is as obsolete as a single family TV was in the 1970's.
For those looking for real examples, count me in. I had built a box and put 98 on it years ago becasue I had a legal copy. Recently it went from the fastest hardware in the house to the slowest several times. (my kids use that machine). Fixing it required a format and reinstall + configuration + drivers + applications = hours and hours of my time.
When the frequency of the rebuild moved up to just a couple months, I dropped Ubuntu Breezy Badger on it and later upgraded to Daper Drake. It is still the fastest machine in the house. The kids only complaint is myspace upgraded to flash 9 and the newest falsh for Linux is Flash 7.
I liked the lack of any need to install any drivers whatsoever. Everything worked with the exception with it not playing MP3 files due to the propritary format. Installed the Lame encoder and all is fine.
A google search was required to learn how the edit the hosts file to do the ad blocking. But all in all it was a lot less online searching than I needed to do to edit the Windows registry to remove malware.
Even installing my networked printers did not require installing any drivers.
Don't forget to look up the designed for schools on a budget solution ready to roll. Edubuntu set up with thin clients and a server may be a turn key solution for the school on a budget.
Even Toyota does this. One of the factory service items (I think 100K miles) is to deep cycle the traction battery. In the car software it has an occasional equalisation cycle which you may or may not notice in normal driving. The engine will run longer and cause a temporary drop in fuel effeciency as it fully charges the battery. (the battery is normaly kept between 40-80% charge) I've noticed this only once in 75K miles of driving. The software may skip some of the equalisation operations if your normal driving takes you over mountains which will fully charge the battery and take care of that automatic maitnance interval.
Cell phones and laptops are different animals, they use Li-Ion not NiMH of the Prius.
Some newer equipment does indeed use Li-Ion batteries. However the ThinkPad T21 I am using right now uses NIMH. Sorry I didn't specify to compare the same tech against the same tech. My cordless phone still uses NiCad cells, so the tech used is not limited to just one technology. The advantage is cost. My home wireless phone cost much less than a replacement battery for my Nokia cell phone.
For long battery life, they do a lot of battery management to make the battery last the life of the car.
For starters they do not treat the battery the same way you would treat a cell phone or laptop battery. Full charge then deep discharge cycles are not done. The battery is rarely charged to 100% and almost never discharged below 50%.
There are Prius cars out there with over 250K miles and still going strong on the original battery. Do some online research on the rate of Prius battery failures. Most battery failures are not the HV traction pack but the 12V cabin battery.
Cell phones and laptops are often charged fully and run down below 50% for long battery run-time. This kills batteries. Cell phone and laptop batteries life is not expected to last more than a couple years. The Prius battery on the other hand is expected to last the life of the car. The plug in mod may change the expected battery life considerably.
They had large metal roofs that almost completely blocked cell phone signal inside.
The key to any bi-directional repeater is there must be a block between the outside and inside antennas. Without that attenuation between the antennas, a feedback loop is formed that may operate on or off channel. These unlicensed instalations by the clueless without test equipment (spectrum analyzer) are the ones getting nastygrams from the FCC. By trying to make up for loss of a signal by a hill, the clueless install a 2-way amplifier with the antennas unshielded from each other and crank up the gain. This results in a solid interference of dead air carrier for the FCC to direction find.
Moral of the story.. This is not a weekend warrier do-it-yourself project. The instalation needs to be done by someone with the test equipment to verify the system does not feedback and broadcast a signal of it's own.
The big issue with bi-directional amplifiers are too often the antennas are mounted too close together and without a signal blocking obstruction in between. This like a PA system with monitors speakers too close to microphones creates positive feedback at some frequency. In a PA system this causes the operator to reduce the gain to stop the squeal. In a bi-directional amplifier, seldom does the unlicensed operator have a clue the system is squealing right on top of somebody else's licensed frequency. Pro's that install these bi-directional amplifiers have the test gear to check for unwanted radiation and take corrective steps such as lowering the gain, moving the outside antenna to a location providing better isolation, or such.
Disclaimer.. Before my current job, I set one up for a Motorolla 800 Mhz trunked radio system. And yes, when it was first powered up it did feedback and we did take immediate steps to correct the problem. Without proper test gear we would not have known.
I remember the 3 pound book that came with DOS 3.21. I aslo noticed the book that came with Windows 98.
In DOS I could look up the pramaters to set DRIVEPARM to install a 720K floppy. In the Windows book there is nothing regarding editing any system files. It's more geared on how to click, right click and drag and drop.
Assuming, of course, that one considers it wise to use MSIE at all, given a choice. But PHBs from coast to coast have left many millions of cube inmates with exactly that: no choice.
Many of us cube inmates use IE as required internaly as required. On break, we re-boot into a live Linex CD and are unable to log into the corp domain, but happly point firefox at the corp autoproxy and surf away. It is safe for the corp as nothing is saved to disk. I love Ubuntu for this.
I agree. For the most part I don't have e-mail at all. I check my box once or twice a month and clean it out. Those who know me know this and will let me know if they sent anything that I need to look for.
Spam has killed e-mail as a useful communications tool.
But today I looked at hardware prices and found out that my 2 year old 3.4 GHz Intel motherboard with AGP bus is hopelessly outdated, and that you can get a dual core Intel CPU cheap.
I just wished I could wave the same magic over my 0.001 Gig Internet connection. A super fast system that can render full motion video is fine as long as the video isn't Buffering 02% Complete Buffering 03% complete....
Oh well, everyone hold their breath until the RIAA disappears in a puff of irrelevance. 10 years from now, they'll be a distant memory.
You mean like SCO died? I have a feeling they will start to have money problems as people move away from RIAA labels like people moved away from SCO, but the lawyer money will be there in hopes for a big settlement that will make them rich. Too bad they aren't a public stock like SCOX. It would be fun to watch. Watching SCOX stock has been fun. The value in trading on some days is less than the value of my car. It's hovering near $2 and the volume has been in the 1-5 thousand range. Why they are still trading is a mystery to me.
Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12, @04:08PM (#16091296) You should get a Pentium !!!. I hear it makes your Internet faster.
I already have one. But thanks for recommending one anyway. I think that may be part of my internet bandwidth problem. I have a bunch of machines hanging off one router which is hanging off a slow cable modem connection.
If you want serious monitoring and control and have a budget for replacement hardware, consider the just released Intel® vPro(TM) technology using Intel® Core(TM)2 Duo processors. It goes beyond software only solutions. It has the ability to remotely power up a machine that is turned off. If you need to fix a dead or crashed OS, that can also be done remotely. The OS runs inside a hardware based firmware shell making it possible to boot up the hardware even if the OS will not. From the firmware shell, the OS can then be repaired or replaced remotely. It is designed for the enterprise so the IT department doesn't have to spend the time to go to users PC's or haul them in for rebuilding. This shell monitoring and controlling the PC is supposed to save a bundle on IT costs.
I understand for now this might not be a solution due to your existing hardware, but when you upgrade, the Core 2 processors will save on your power bill and AC requirements. The advertisements claim 40% faster on 40% less power.
Right now the bottleneck at home is the Internet connection. I wish it could get cranked up from it's 0.001 Gig speeds. It would be nice to get a connection speed somewhere near the CPU speeds. Then sending e-mail while downloading music might be possible.;-)
Given their obsession with proprietary Sony software (ATRAC comes to mind) and hardware (miniDisc, memory stick - when we already have too many flash standards already, UMD, etc), the general public is less likely to choose Sony in the first place.
That paragraph alone sums it up nicely. My first digital camera was a SONY. My experiance with it was short battery life. It was good for 1/3 of a wedding and none of the reception, 1/4 ball game, etc. Many recommended buying a spare battery. At $40 a pop, I passed and stuck with a camera that tool AA batteries. I use NiMH as a primary battery and second set. When they die, I move on to backup batteries. The CF card can be read in any CF reader. No special software or cable needed to get the photos off the card.
A problem with the SCSI controller, or with the drive's on-board electronics?
If the former, just replace the controller. Check this by moving the drives to a box with a working controller.
Don't overlook the possibility an employee may have lifted the terminator. I've seen where this is overlooked when drives stop working in a SCSI environment.
Sooner or later, it will have something that you need and can't get on XP, or you will get a new PC that has it bundled (or you are not on windows anyway so you aren't part of this conversation:) )
Many assumptions are made of a monoculture at a user's home. This is starting to fall apart. Many years ago most homes had one TV. Now many have several.
Many years ago most homes didn't have a PC, then a few years later they only had a family PC, Now the kids get cast off machines and later get or build an extreme game machine.
Here at home going from oldest to newest;
A Windows 95 laptop. It is not upgraded because it is maxxed out at 72 Meg of EDO memory. Reason it is still in service.. It's my MIDI workshop and piano tutor. It fits a bracket on top of my synth. It is not web exposed.
A Windows 98 SE PC. Primary CD ripper/burner MP3 workshop. No need to upgrade. Runs Office 97 just fine. Heavely firewalled and recently nuked by a CD that tried to auto run something because I didn't hold the shift key down long enough. It gets a re-format and rebuild next week. My primary GPS maping machine.
A Win 2K laptop. My primary laptop and DMX512 lighting console.
A second Win 2K laptop. Spare and for the Foster kids to use.
An XP home box. My wife's machine. At the time of purchase it had the biggest hard drive in the house with an 80 Gig drive. I was going to tap into the space for LAN storage space, but alas Win XP home makes a very bad fileserver for a lan. Sharing a folder is an all or nothing proposition. I can't stick my photos on it and give my kids read only access..
A Ubuntu box. The newest addition. It is a rebuild of the kids Windows 98 box. It was rebuilt after a motherboard failure as a Win 98 box because I had a legal copy of the OS. It had the fastest hardware in the house. Within 6 months it became the slowest machine in the house twice, even slower than one of the ancient Win2K laptops running a 366 Mhz processor. Wiped the hard dirve and installed Ubuntu Dapper Drake right after it was released. It has been running solid ever since with no issues.
Look at how many WiFi signals are in your neighborhood. People seldom buy a router simply to feed one machine a network connection.
Oh the solution to the XP box making a lousy fileserver was solved with a NAS box running Linus. I bought a Simple Tech SimpleShare. It has a Riser Filesystem. It supports per user permissions. It servers both SMB for a windows network and NFS shares for your NIX environment. It also does on the fly encryption so if someone does a raid and takes your fileserver, it won't mount the shares until the encryption key is re-entered. Best of all, I don't have to leave a PC on.
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The senior sysadmin looked at it thoughtfully, then flipped a single switch. Every server in the cabinet went down.
.8 amps at the breaker box to identify the circuit without interrupting power. If both legs in the cabinet are on the same breaker, it's time to investigate further.
For those who don't wish to dump running servers to test redundant power, I use a 100 Watt light bulb on a christmas flasher and a clamp ammeter. I can see the current wiggle
Why can't there be legal format conversions? Why can't MS (and other DRM happy companies) release a tool that converts "old" DRMed media to "new" DRMed media...still locked to the same computer.
I don't know about you, but I am no longer using my PC from 5 years ago as it arrived. Windows 98 has been replaced. This breaks DRM files but not MP3 files. Any questions?
Locked to the same computer with it's 5 year or older OS is NOT and option for my music collection. My LP's still play and can be ripped and played on any PC I have or will have. The same is true for my Compact Cassettes and Compact Disc's. This won't be true for any DRM files which is why I don't buy them.
The whole idea that Win98/ME users are going to flock over to Linux on the sole basis that support had ended is a red herring.
I'll bite. I don't think it's a red herring. Users switch because unpatchable systems are sitting ducks online. My kids were using a Windows 98 machine. After the semi annual reformat, reconfigure, install patches, and reinstall apps and drivers changed to a monthly task, I moved it to Ubuntu. I upgraded since from Breezy Badger to Dapper Drake but is wasn't nessary for any degradition in performance.
almost always -- because they're deathly afraid to touch their computers.
Not so in my case. It's the apps stupid. I have a Windows 95 laptop. It has a tiny hard drive and only 72 meg of EDO memory. It's hit it's limit. It does not have a USB port. It does have a real joysitck port with the MIDI MPU port. It runs the piano tutor software. It is not web connected. It is fast enough and new hardware would be an expense as the new hardware on the market does not have MIDI/Joystick ports built in. It does the job just fine thank you. With a 16 bit cardbus NIC it uses my LAN resources just fine including my fileserver and printers. Needless to say this puppy is blocked at the router to the internet. With a built in modem, I hang it on the phone line when I need to recieve a fax. I have a legal copy of WinFax for it.
An upgrade of the OS would downgrade the space in memory for applications.
To paraphrase what my long post could be, the answer is "Its the apps stupid!".
To which I fully agree. I need a stable web browser on a stable OS. That's my Ubuntu box. I need to put together Power Point presentations, that's done on the Win2K laptop. I need to print topo maps for my back country trips and interface waypoints with my GPS, that's my Windows 95 laptop. I need to run tax preperation software, that's on the wife's XP home box.
Note the box for finance is not the box used for general web browsing. A single family PC is as obsolete as a single family TV was in the 1970's.
For those looking for real examples, count me in. I had built a box and put 98 on it years ago becasue I had a legal copy. Recently it went from the fastest hardware in the house to the slowest several times. (my kids use that machine). Fixing it required a format and reinstall + configuration + drivers + applications = hours and hours of my time.
When the frequency of the rebuild moved up to just a couple months, I dropped Ubuntu Breezy Badger on it and later upgraded to Daper Drake. It is still the fastest machine in the house. The kids only complaint is myspace upgraded to flash 9 and the newest falsh for Linux is Flash 7.
I liked the lack of any need to install any drivers whatsoever. Everything worked with the exception with it not playing MP3 files due to the propritary format. Installed the Lame encoder and all is fine.
A google search was required to learn how the edit the hosts file to do the ad blocking. But all in all it was a lot less online searching than I needed to do to edit the Windows registry to remove malware.
Even installing my networked printers did not require installing any drivers.
Don't forget to look up the designed for schools on a budget solution ready to roll. Edubuntu set up with thin clients and a server may be a turn key solution for the school on a budget.
Note the word "OCCASIONAL."
Even Toyota does this. One of the factory service items (I think 100K miles) is to deep cycle the traction battery. In the car software it has an occasional equalisation cycle which you may or may not notice in normal driving. The engine will run longer and cause a temporary drop in fuel effeciency as it fully charges the battery. (the battery is normaly kept between 40-80% charge) I've noticed this only once in 75K miles of driving. The software may skip some of the equalisation operations if your normal driving takes you over mountains which will fully charge the battery and take care of that automatic maitnance interval.
And if you don't guess who they'll call first about how their computer has gotten SLOW again.
After the second rebuild in 6 months, I put Ubuntu on my kids computer. End of problem. The kids like the uptime.
Cell phones and laptops are different animals, they use Li-Ion not NiMH of the Prius.
Some newer equipment does indeed use Li-Ion batteries. However the ThinkPad T21 I am using right now uses NIMH. Sorry I didn't specify to compare the same tech against the same tech. My cordless phone still uses NiCad cells, so the tech used is not limited to just one technology. The advantage is cost. My home wireless phone cost much less than a replacement battery for my Nokia cell phone.
FYI, the Prius does not use a Lithium battery.
For long battery life, they do a lot of battery management to make the battery last the life of the car.
For starters they do not treat the battery the same way you would treat a cell phone or laptop battery. Full charge then deep discharge cycles are not done. The battery is rarely charged to 100% and almost never discharged below 50%.
There are Prius cars out there with over 250K miles and still going strong on the original battery. Do some online research on the rate of Prius battery failures. Most battery failures are not the HV traction pack but the 12V cabin battery.
Cell phones and laptops are often charged fully and run down below 50% for long battery run-time. This kills batteries. Cell phone and laptop batteries life is not expected to last more than a couple years. The Prius battery on the other hand is expected to last the life of the car. The plug in mod may change the expected battery life considerably.
They had large metal roofs that almost completely blocked cell phone signal inside.
The key to any bi-directional repeater is there must be a block between the outside and inside antennas. Without that attenuation between the antennas, a feedback loop is formed that may operate on or off channel. These unlicensed instalations by the clueless without test equipment (spectrum analyzer) are the ones getting nastygrams from the FCC. By trying to make up for loss of a signal by a hill, the clueless install a 2-way amplifier with the antennas unshielded from each other and crank up the gain. This results in a solid interference of dead air carrier for the FCC to direction find.
Moral of the story.. This is not a weekend warrier do-it-yourself project. The instalation needs to be done by someone with the test equipment to verify the system does not feedback and broadcast a signal of it's own.
The big issue with bi-directional amplifiers are too often the antennas are mounted too close together and without a signal blocking obstruction in between. This like a PA system with monitors speakers too close to microphones creates positive feedback at some frequency. In a PA system this causes the operator to reduce the gain to stop the squeal. In a bi-directional amplifier, seldom does the unlicensed operator have a clue the system is squealing right on top of somebody else's licensed frequency. Pro's that install these bi-directional amplifiers have the test gear to check for unwanted radiation and take corrective steps such as lowering the gain, moving the outside antenna to a location providing better isolation, or such.
Disclaimer.. Before my current job, I set one up for a Motorolla 800 Mhz trunked radio system. And yes, when it was first powered up it did feedback and we did take immediate steps to correct the problem. Without proper test gear we would not have known.
I remember the 3 pound book that came with DOS 3.21. I aslo noticed the book that came with Windows 98.
In DOS I could look up the pramaters to set DRIVEPARM to install a 720K floppy. In the Windows book there is nothing regarding editing any system files. It's more geared on how to click, right click and drag and drop.
Assuming, of course, that one considers it wise to use MSIE at all, given a choice. But PHBs from coast to coast have left many millions of cube inmates with exactly that: no choice.
Many of us cube inmates use IE as required internaly as required. On break, we re-boot into a live Linex CD and are unable to log into the corp domain, but happly point firefox at the corp autoproxy and surf away.
It is safe for the corp as nothing is saved to disk. I love Ubuntu for this.
Spam is a serious problem.
I agree. For the most part I don't have e-mail at all. I check my box once or twice a month and clean it out. Those who know me know this and will let me know if they sent anything that I need to look for.
Spam has killed e-mail as a useful communications tool.
They don't. Limewire has been sued. http://www.ilrweb.com/viewILRPDF.asp?filename=aris ta_limewire_complaint
But today I looked at hardware prices and found out that my 2 year old 3.4 GHz Intel motherboard with AGP bus is hopelessly outdated, and that you can get a dual core Intel CPU cheap.
I just wished I could wave the same magic over my 0.001 Gig Internet connection. A super fast system that can render full motion video is fine as long as the video isn't Buffering 02% Complete Buffering 03% complete....
Oh well, everyone hold their breath until the RIAA disappears in a puff of irrelevance. 10 years from now, they'll be a distant memory.
You mean like SCO died? I have a feeling they will start to have money problems as people move away from RIAA labels like people moved away from SCO, but the lawyer money will be there in hopes for a big settlement that will make them rich. Too bad they aren't a public stock like SCOX. It would be fun to watch. Watching SCOX stock has been fun. The value in trading on some days is less than the value of my car. It's hovering near $2 and the volume has been in the 1-5 thousand range. Why they are still trading is a mystery to me.
Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12, @04:08PM (#16091296)
You should get a Pentium !!!. I hear it makes your Internet faster.
I already have one. But thanks for recommending one anyway. I think that may be part of my internet bandwidth problem. I have a bunch of machines hanging off one router which is hanging off a slow cable modem connection.
If you want serious monitoring and control and have a budget for replacement hardware, consider the just released Intel® vPro(TM) technology using Intel® Core(TM)2 Duo processors. It goes beyond software only solutions. It has the ability to remotely power up a machine that is turned off. If you need to fix a dead or crashed OS, that can also be done remotely. The OS runs inside a hardware based firmware shell making it possible to boot up the hardware even if the OS will not. From the firmware shell, the OS can then be repaired or replaced remotely. It is designed for the enterprise so the IT department doesn't have to spend the time to go to users PC's or haul them in for rebuilding. This shell monitoring and controlling the PC is supposed to save a bundle on IT costs.
I understand for now this might not be a solution due to your existing hardware, but when you upgrade, the Core 2 processors will save on your power bill and AC requirements. The advertisements claim 40% faster on 40% less power.
They should have made the FSB 4 Mhz faster.
;-)
Right now the bottleneck at home is the Internet connection. I wish it could get cranked up from it's 0.001 Gig speeds. It would be nice to get a connection speed somewhere near the CPU speeds. Then sending e-mail while downloading music might be possible.
Given their obsession with proprietary Sony software (ATRAC comes to mind) and hardware (miniDisc, memory stick - when we already have too many flash standards already, UMD, etc), the general public is less likely to choose Sony in the first place.
That paragraph alone sums it up nicely. My first digital camera was a SONY. My experiance with it was short battery life. It was good for 1/3 of a wedding and none of the reception, 1/4 ball game, etc. Many recommended buying a spare battery. At $40 a pop, I passed and stuck with a camera that tool AA batteries. I use NiMH as a primary battery and second set. When they die, I move on to backup batteries. The CF card can be read in any CF reader. No special software or cable needed to get the photos off the card.
A problem with the SCSI controller, or with the drive's on-board electronics?
If the former, just replace the controller. Check this by moving the drives to a box with a working controller.
Don't overlook the possibility an employee may have lifted the terminator. I've seen where this is overlooked when drives stop working in a SCSI environment.
Sooner or later, it will have something that you need and can't get on XP, or you will get a new PC that has it bundled (or you are not on windows anyway so you aren't part of this conversation :) )
Many assumptions are made of a monoculture at a user's home. This is starting to fall apart. Many years ago most homes had one TV. Now many have several.
Many years ago most homes didn't have a PC, then a few years later they only had a family PC, Now the kids get cast off machines and later get or build an extreme game machine.
Here at home going from oldest to newest;
A Windows 95 laptop. It is not upgraded because it is maxxed out at 72 Meg of EDO memory. Reason it is still in service.. It's my MIDI workshop and piano tutor. It fits a bracket on top of my synth. It is not web exposed.
A Windows 98 SE PC. Primary CD ripper/burner MP3 workshop. No need to upgrade. Runs Office 97 just fine. Heavely firewalled and recently nuked by a CD that tried to auto run something because I didn't hold the shift key down long enough. It gets a re-format and rebuild next week. My primary GPS maping machine.
A Win 2K laptop. My primary laptop and DMX512 lighting console.
A second Win 2K laptop. Spare and for the Foster kids to use.
An XP home box. My wife's machine. At the time of purchase it had the biggest hard drive in the house with an 80 Gig drive. I was going to tap into the space for LAN storage space, but alas Win XP home makes a very bad fileserver for a lan. Sharing a folder is an all or nothing proposition. I can't stick my photos on it and give my kids read only access..
A Ubuntu box. The newest addition. It is a rebuild of the kids Windows 98 box. It was rebuilt after a motherboard failure as a Win 98 box because I had a legal copy of the OS. It had the fastest hardware in the house. Within 6 months it became the slowest machine in the house twice, even slower than one of the ancient Win2K laptops running a 366 Mhz processor. Wiped the hard dirve and installed Ubuntu Dapper Drake right after it was released. It has been running solid ever since with no issues.
Look at how many WiFi signals are in your neighborhood. People seldom buy a router simply to feed one machine a network connection.
Oh the solution to the XP box making a lousy fileserver was solved with a NAS box running Linus. I bought a Simple Tech SimpleShare. It has a Riser Filesystem. It supports per user permissions. It servers both SMB for a windows network and NFS shares for your NIX environment. It also does on the fly encryption so if someone does a raid and takes your fileserver, it won't mount the shares until the encryption key is re-entered. Best of all, I don't have to leave a PC on.