>>>And I thought I had a nice system here at the office.:-) My home system is a 200 w/MMX, 48 Mb, and a 2 Gb drive. I'm going to try to make it last at least one more year. Can't afford to have to upgrade the machine every year.
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>>I need several machines at home, at least one that can handle IIS4, since I'm doing a lot of ASP development right now, so an NT Server is pretty well mandated. I watch some of the discounters pretty closely for price deals - as an example, I picked up the XP39100Ws (9.1GB UW SCSI drives) for under $400 each, including shipping; the CP2107s were a steal at $130/each (they were SCA mount drives, so I had to buy adapters, but again, I got UW SCSI drives cheap.)
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>>AFAIC, SCSI is pretty much mandatory if you're working the hardware very hard; buying a motherboard that I like with the Adaptec Chipset on the board saves me a slot (or two), and usually 4$40-60 on the cost of an equivalent board without the on-board SCSI Chipset and a decent quality HA. Using all Adaptec makes moving stuff between systems easy - if you switch vendors, they may take different approaches to how to reference a drive >1GB, so you end up having to reformat once in a while.
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>>I've found a great vendor for SuperMicro stuff out on the web - PC Nut Computers; I met the owner, Humphrey Chen, while doing work for PC World OnLine. His prices are great, he knows what he's doing, and he doesn't cut corners buying crappy components. If you deal with clients who need small enterprise servers, he's got the equipment and knowledge to put together solid, fault tolerant systems at a fraction of the cost of an HP, Compaq or IBM server box using either SuperMicro or ASUS motherboards using multiple PII or Xeon processors and the SuperMicro or PC Power & Cooling cases.
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>>Not being married helps, too.
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>First thanks for the advice on that retailer (not to mention the URL).
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>That last line, however, explains a lot. I'm "Married With Children" or worse yet "Married with Teenagers".:-) This doesn't even include the grown daughter (and son-in-law and grandkids).

Yep - it's nice knowing that I am the budget review committee, and I don't have to budget to cover family expenses. This leaves me at 41 with too many computers lying around, and the option to spend far too much money on a car with only two doors...no life, admittedly, but nice toys.