So last night my desktop broke. I still havnt figured out exactly what the cause was, but I’ve interchanged all the parts except the motherboard, cpu and power supply. Tonight when I get home I’ll try switching out the CPU to see if mine is ‘fried’. I was at work yesterday, using my desktop via terminal services, and it just dissappeared. When I arrived at home in the evening, I was prompted with the default blue background on all three of my monitors, and a mouse. No errors, and no way to do anything except move the mouse. Upon rebooting, into savemode or regular mode, it would BlueScreen and flash so quickly that viewing the error reported was impossible. So I started interchanging parts. The system had been freezing for quite some time, but usually only when doing heavy disk activity on one speciffic disk. After unplugging the disk, there was no change, So unplugged all the disks, and put in an unused older disk. It would not let me instsall windows onto the disk, not because it was a bad disk, but because XP installation would crash every time at a diffrent place, thus further identifying some hardware issue. I put the original disk back in, and tried the memory swap, with no luck. Then I noticed that the CPU fan was clogged with crap. Taking apart and cleaning the heatsink solved a similar issue a little over a year ago. I spent about 20 mins cleaning the CPU Heatsink, including high water pressure from my waterpick, then dried it with a hairdryer. Amazing how much heat it collected from the hairdryer, the copper heatsink was too hot to touch, but it sure was dry. I tried again to get past the bluescreens. no luck. I gave up for the night, after three hours of trying.

I got in bed and started to use my laptop, for the first time at home in a long time actually, and saw the deal.
This deal was too good to pass up. Danman got a similar deal about a month ago, and I’ve just been waiting for it to come around again. Finally, I get the oppertunity to purchase a Dell PowerEdge server at an unbelivable price of $340 after tax, upgrades, and shipping. As you can see in the image, its a Poweredge SC420 P4 2.8Ghz. 800Mhz Front Side Bus, 40gb, 256mb for $298 It cost an additional $10 to upgrade to 533mhz ram (still only 256mb) and another $10 to upgrade from a 40gb to 80gb SATA Hard Drive. The other thing thats really cool about this system, is that it has PCI-Express. It has one 1x slot, and one 8x slot, and with a little fidgeting, and cutting of unneccesarry plastic, you can fit a 16x PCI-E card in the 8x slot. This system also sports a Broadcom gigabit ethernet controller onboard. The only thing its really missing, to work well as a desktop system, is a sound card, and Firewire card, but with 3x PCI slots and a 1x PCI-E slot, there’s plenty of room to add whatever I might need.

On another note, I still need to order my MacMini, but I’ve decided to wait until after the next OS revision comes out, partly because i dont have the money to buy a Mac Mini right now, nor did I have the money to buy the Dell server. Oh well. Life goes on. Debt Rules.

MythTV 0.17 came out today, with support for an OSX frontend. Even more reason now to buy a Mac Mini. This release also has much better HDTV support, and even includes a ‘widescreen’ theme for its builtin menu system.