Welcome

“Ah” I hear you say, another new blog for me not to update, and you’re probably right, so let me attempt to explain:

Until recently I’ve been running (but not maintaining) my website on a Linux box sat at home under my TV which was working very nicely. Recently however, I upgraded it from Ubuntu 9.4 to 9.10, at which point it decided to not recognise my second HDD, effectively rendering the box useless without, possibly, rolling back. I then read that they estimate only 10% of users upgraded in-place without issue.

At the same time Windows 7 arrived on the scene, of which I had pre-ordered 3 copies. One of copy of Windows 7 was to update my old machine based around an Nvidia GeForce 2 chipset, which I now know isn’t supported by the new OS (or it seems, Vista before this). The result of this is that I now have the choice of either rolling back to Windows XP Media Center Edition, or buying new hardware.

I’ve been running XP MCE for years, at it streams nicely to the Xbox 360, hence why I had this in addition to the Linux box (yes, I had installed various media streaming solutions to the Ubuntu box, but none of these had the tight integration MCE offers.

Then, yesterday, I had a thought. Doing a little research it seems that Windows Home Server will also play nicely with the hardware, plus this will allow me to backup from my various boxes very easily. I had been looking at an HP solution for about £400, but I just don’t have that kind of money anymore, but if it works on the old hardware…

So I’ve downloaded the 30 day trial (and I now see there’s a 120 day trial available), installed it on the old XP MCE machine without too much trouble, and I’m now testing this.

The upshot of all of this is that, if it goes well, they’ll be a reduced need for the Ubuntu server, especially since running 2 machines 24-7 is going to use more electricity (which isn’t cheap nowadays) so I’ve decided to move my tech blog that was based on that machine to here, at least for the time being, we’ll see how it goes.

I’ll update all the URLs when there’s a few more entries on here, then just fix the old Ubuntu box when I get time, and use this as a test machine.

I hope that makes sense.

Stu.