So I'm now the very proud owner of a nice new laptop - which means I now have the opportunity to have a little rethink of my room/flat/network setup. But being quite indecisive, and wishing to keep further spending to a minimum, I thought I'd give my whimsical mooching through website sale offers a bit of a rest, and ask here for some suggestions...

First off, I have :

Workstation A (Win2K SP4, Asus A8N-Sli Deluxe, AMD 4000+, 1GB DDR, 256MB 7800GTX)
- this is my machine, that to date has been running 24/7 as my room's computer, and as file-share/store/stream for the house's other computers/consoles. It's a solid (if a little old) machine - but the PSU (fan) has steadily been getting louder and louder - and (in the first) I want to make it quieter, or at least move it out of my room.

Workstation B (Asus A8V Deluxe, AMD 3800+, 1GB DDR, 128MB 6800GS & PCI WiFi)
- this is my mate's dead Mesh, the hard drive gave up some time back and we've never bought a replacement to resurrect it, and chances are he's long since misplaced the recovery WinXP Home DVD anyway.



My first thoughts were to steal the PSU from B and replace it for the one in A so I might put A in our living room - but B's PSU doesn't have a PCI-Express lead for A's GTX - so I'm still looking at a new PSU.

UNLESS

I swap the PSU and downgrade/swap the GPU (neither are HDMI, but our living room TV is happy to take VGA) since "the plan" is only for media-frontend use (iTunes, WMP, etc) - and at the same time I could also steal out the ram from B to help A a long a little.

This would leave me/us with a single (quiet) computer with plenty of storage that I could either keep in my room (and run a 10-15m VGA to my telly) or simply put in our living room ; to continue doing all the file-share/store/stream activities.

BUT

After a few days of playing with Win7 Home (on my new laptop) I'm liking the look & feel of how things have come on (I use XP at work and have never thought it any different to 2K, and completely "missed" Vista) - and I'm quite interested in using Windows Mesh / SkyDrive to keep my laptop sync'd with "home" and also employ the extended features of WMP & MCE for the media-frontend (in the lounge).

SO

that has me thinking, why cannibalise - when I could make B the living room media-PC (with a new HD + Win7) AND keep A for my room (although the likelihood of me using it over the laptop is slim). But my indecisiveness has me looking at the cost (PSU+HD+Win7) and thinking "I should just buy a cheap off-the-shelf Win7 PC with space for extra HD's, and be done with it"

HMMM

What would you guys do?

Exactly the feelings I have,

It's not been my best discovery of the week though - no, that honour falls to Tonido - which, after just a few hours of setup and play, has me convinced we are living in the future!

Your machine A is similar to my desktop which is currently being used by my sister in the UK. I replaced the PSU with a very expensive (but silent and freaking awesome) Seasonic X 650w. This would cover me for any future upgrades and meant that as and when a new desktop was required it would certainly survive the transition. I also spent £35 on an ATI card with HDMI. The rest of it is an X2 3800+, same mobo and 2gig of RAM. It served my TV and A/V amp beautifully on Windows 7 and I would no doubt continue to use it on my return. The only problem is the case only holds 4 HDDs and I've maxed it with 3.5tbs.

Personally, I'd look into a quieter PSU and if you don't need to game, swap out the GPU as well. Then you're sorted. Quiet, does everything you need, relatively inexpensive.

The socket 939 setups are still more than adequate for general use and that particular motherboard is legendary. It'd be a shame to waste it.

so is it any good does it do what it says ...

Yes, Yes it does.

I've had some teething problems with it - mostly relating to 2K not liking the latest build, but the (very efficient) support from codelathe on their forum has seen me get a previous build .exe and now all is running fine and dandy. My only "issue" with the "fix" (so far) is that some of the settings of the current build (that I put on my laptop) seem to be absent, but that's a minor niggle.

Clearly I've not had much time spent with it, or had cause to really exploit it in the few short days I've had it running - but seeing as it consolidates (for me) TVersity/WinAmp media streaming, Setting-up-an-FTP and having to do manual-backups all into one pacakge, I'm easily sold.

I'm now looking into "users" and how they behave to see if I should go that route (rather than handing out the master account login to all) - I've not made life easy for myself by creating two accounts at once (I'm juggling in and out) - and there will come at point when I need to just "let it run" and see how it works day to day.

It's worth bearing in mind the Blackberry app. isn't particularly solid - but that was always going to be a fancy-addition in my eyes, as I never planned to retire my Sansa clip from music-on-the-go duties.



...still got to order that PSU though... and still tip-toeing around the idea of buying Win7 outright - the last time I changed/bought an OS it came with a computer I bought for uni. in 2000!

Wow. I have just installed it on my Linux box, and have been walking around listening to FLACs on my iPhone over 3G. You're right, it is the future!

On the move, out and about? Nice. I've not got there yet with my Blackberry (still issues with the app.) but I'm loving fact I don't have to EVER remember to take anything on a usb key, or email myself stuff, it's so very very awesome!


As for an update on my thread, Win7 & my PSU arrived yesterday, but I'm holding off the rebuild until my new media keyboard shows up (with a can of compressed air) on Monday - I might as well try to condense every action into one all out assault.

The question now is, what do I do with my mate's cannibalised corpse of a computer? I can't imagine there's much money to be had in selling the CPU & GPU on ebay.

Right so my power supply (the silentpcreview reccomended Nexus Value 430) has a "1 - 18" cable w/ Aux 12V 4+4-pin connector" but my mobo has a 4 pin ATX12V.

My old psu also has an 8pin variant- but fortunately came with an 8-to-4pin adaptor.

Silly (obvious) question - but would it be okay to use the same adaptor wouldn't it?

4+4 should mean it splits in 2.

If not just plug half of it in.

I thought as much, but they "looked" to be bunched 4- and 4+ and I didn't want to risk the gamble - either way, I went with using the adaptor, and everything booted fine... the PSU is totally inaudible - so much so that for the first time ever I can hear my gpu fan, and that (with the case panels on) is effectively silent.

My only problem now is that with all the fan noise removed, I can hear a constant, light/muffled tick-tick-tick-tick-tick coming from my (albeit quite old) 250GB system HD - so I've opted to wait on installing Win7 (onto a drive that sounds like it's about to die) and get a new one. I couldn't justify the price/capacity of a small SSD, so settled on a 320gb SATA2 samsung... so vexing that for the same £60 I got 1TB near three years ago.

Okay so my new hard drive arrived today, got it in, and windows 7 going through the first steps of setup... but it turns out the ticking wasn't my old system drive! I suspect it's my floppy drive (it's got that kind of sound) so I'll be unplugging that once the install's complete.

I'm not to bothered really - sure the cost was a bit of a bitter pill toswallow but it was high time I got a new one, and had a totally clean fresh start, the question now is...

Once I've Windowsy all running nicely, can/how do I install the old hard drive (with Win 2K on) without it upsetting (at boot) Windows7 ?

ALSO

on the install restarts, I had to force the boot priority to hard drive (where I'd set it to DVD first) - which is all fair enough - but like an idiot (perhaps) I've got the hard drive plugged into the second sata port on my mobo - not the first - will that matter? I've three drives (the presumed dead ex-OS & two storage drives) to go in next - so do I swap the leads over when the machine is shutdown - or do the ports not "poll" that order/manner?

It's been so long since I've had to do this!

AND THERE'S MORE

So Windows 7 is running all nice and shiny on my old machine - and since I've it plugged into our lan/wan and I've this laptop on, it's gone and asked me for the homegroup password. Simple, done.

BUT

When my laptop was identified, it was the name I first used - but having since changed the computer name - that seems, well, just a little bit odd. I've had a nose around, my laptop shows no trace of the original name, just the current one... so where the hell did my old computer get that from?

For installing the old drive - as its Sata it is hot swappable. Boot the machine up with your new disk then once up plug in the sata for the old disk. The system will see it and you can then format it / copy data over etc

I dont think sata cares what order / port the drives are in. Personally I would have the boot on 0 and so on - although that might be more for neatness than anything else

Well I dared myself and did it anyway last night - and now I've MCE on my TV with 3TB of media storage ready for playing and sharing...

BUT (the complications continue)

My original plan was to retire the PS3 and 360 from media duties in the lounge, and I was simply going to whip the lan out from the 360 and shove it in the back of the PC once I'd relocated it... but, obviously, that's not going to help multiplayer, game updates and such!

I do have a wireless card in the PC, but since it's to be the central hub, there's not much point connecting through that to our lan - but I do have 2x rj45 ports on the PC. I know you can set up wireless devices as an AP, but can you do the same (ie. daisy chain) lan components via lan?

{b}EDIT[/b}
Well that was a relatively short lived "problem" - there's a comprehensive howto on the xbox support site - so that's pretty much everything sorted - all that's left for me to do now is stock up on codecs, look into skins for MCE, and await the arrival of my three 3.5mm>RCA leads to go from stereo to surround sound. I think I can safely say - after some years of searching for a complete integrated home entertainment solution - that I'm pretty much there, and very happy.

Now to find someone who'll make me the enclosure for my sub - then EVERYTHING will be complete.