Before you accuse me

Since I'll be complaining a lot about stupid people, I might as well start close to home. As in with myself. Warning, there will be a lot of geek talk in the next following paragraphs.

I have a really old desktop that I have replaced everything at least once, most things at least twice. The mobo is older and only supports usb 1.0. It's sloooowwww. I've been debating for over a year now, trying to decide between a desktop or a laptop replacement. My wife, aka Glenda, has a new Nikon D40 digital SLR, I have a newish Zune, and Gleda will be getting some sort of mp3 player soon, and iPod classic or a Zune probably. So we want a lot of storage space and want our data to be protected. What I decided on was to get a laptop we could use on the wireless network to store our data on a file server. I kept looking but never buying, then this past black friday, I made an impulse purchase on a Dell Inspiron from Wal-Mart. Pretty nice computer for the price. With that trigger pulled, I started scheming for a low cost server. Tigerdirect had some 750gb hdds on sale, so I decided to get 3, buy a pci raid controller and use my old desktop as my server. To overcome its hardware shortcomings, I figured I would buy a docking station for the laptop and use it to do anything more strenuous than server maintenance. So, for $598 for the laptop and about $500 for the hdds, I was getting 1.5Tb of storage and some mobility. Not too shabby.

Now for the part about my stupidity... I browse ebay and find a Dell docking station and monitor stand for a steal. Bought it and installed it. I go to set the laptop in and I can't get it to seat properly. I remove it, turn it over, and guess what. Yes, that's right, I didn't even check to see if it had the port replicator attachment built in. Sheesh. So now I've got to decide where to go from there. Ended up today buying a barebones kit for $695. Socket 775 mobo, Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 & fan, 256mb pcie video card, 600w p/s. I'll turn the server into a workhorse type and just use the laptop for mobility.

I'm out a lot more than I originally wanted to be, but chances are I'd be replacing the mobo or 1.1 ghz amd on the old machine soon anyway. Now I have the hardware to set up a nice DVR also.