A few weeks ago our main PC died. Well, mostly died. There is a virus on there that no virus scanner I’ve tried can catch. (I suspect Aleah’s new found ability to click on all things shiny led to clicking on Something Bad). Then came the computer crashes that would happen even when trying to re-install the OS on a brand new hard drive. (RAM problem is my only real thought).
So we started talking about things we wanted to do with the computer. We’ve wanted to get it out of that room to make it more “Donavan’s Room”. We’ve also wanted to move the PC into either the living room or into our bedroom – both of which make us want a much smaller computer. Add to this a general (and growing) curiousity about The Other Side…
We got a Mac.
A Mac Mini, to be exact. We get to keep our existing monitor/keyboard/mouse/etc and we get a computer that is roughly the size of a tissue box. (6 1/2 inches wide, 6 1/2 inches long, and 2 inches tall. TINY)
There’s a problem with this though: No Adding Hard Drives. The base model Mac Mini comes with a 160 gig hard drive. To upgrade to a 320 gig hard drive would cost… the same as buying a 1 Terabyte hard drive at regular retail prices.  !?!?!?
So there’s another thing we’ve been talking about doing: getting a computer that we could use to store all our files to access them from the laptop, the desktop, the whatever. Enter in the HP Media Server – which should arrive in the mail today. (go go Amazon Prime Next Day Shipping!)
When it gets here I’m going to load it up with all our media files and create personal space for everyone to store their ‘stuff’. And remember what I said earlier, that I couldn’t even re-install Windows to a new drive? Yeah, that new 1 Terabyte drive is going in the media server right way too. I’ll probably even wipe clean the extra drive that is in the PC and add it in. I expect we’ll have just short of 2 Terabytes of space on the thing to start with.
So that’s the hardware side of what we had happen when the computer died. One new Mac in the house and a home server too.
Now we get to enjoy the software side of things. (such as saying good-bye to all our stored e-mails, and learning an all-new OS)