The Case of the New Computer
Last night it finally happened, the Dell Inspirion that I had been using for the past six years (not to mention three house moves) gave up the fight. First off, this was a solid computer. Used for nearly every facet of my life during the past six years including:
- Partitioned web server when I started my own consulting business in 2004.
- File server for 100+ GB of pictures, music and video, including a huge growth in files with the births of two sons ('06 and '08).
- Accounting system for the entire family.
- Gaming system before I bought a Wii. My wife and I spent many an hour playing Civilization I, II and III on this piece of hardware.
- Home office computer part deux when my wife started to work from home after our move to Austin.
- Learning platform as I played around with education myself on the innards of computers, programming, HTML/CSS and networking.
- I use a MacBook Pro for work and love it.
- My wife has a separate Dell for work now and she loves it.
- We need a central computer in the house to serve as a primary system to hold all of pictures, videos and music for networking throughout the house.
- The computer does not necessarily need any "Office" applications.
- I need the computer to be partially partitioned as a web server to host my blogs, including this one and several family blogs.
- I would like to start doing the family video editing on the home computer, whereas today I use FinalCut on my 15" MacBook Pro.

