Micks' Musings

WARNING COMPUTER JARGON! I have been test driving the Windows 7 beta and Release Candidate (RC) on an old Athlon XP 3200+ based PC. This is a 64bit CPU so I installed both the 32bit and 64bit versions of Windows 7 before settling on the 64bit version when it managed to find all my hardware. Athlon XP 64, Abit AN8, 2GB DDR400 RAM, 200GB HD, Avermedia AverTV Duo Hybrid PCI-E, ATI 2600Pro Video card, Receiver and Remote (MS compatible). Windows 7 beta and RC installed cleanly, installed all the drivers and things worked. I tested the new media centre and it supported both digital tuners, both analog tuners and the FM radio that were present on the TV Tuner card. Being in Canberra there is nothing on Analog TV that is not on digital so for a production media centre PC I would not bother with the Analog tuners but it was nice to get FM radio working. I still occasionally listen to the radio. The music library is nicer than Vista except it refuses to add all my music - it always seems to be...

WARNING TECHNICAL CONTENT! I am sure this is a familiar story. Our media collection is spread out over two NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices and two computers on about 8 hard disks. There is no redundancy - if a disk dies it takes the media with it - and the only backup startegy is to write to DVDs - a waste as we have several bookcases full of the original CDs and DVDs!! It is time for a new file server with redundancy - in other words a RAID based file system. I tried out a few options. Windows Home Server looked promising but it doesn't do RAID 5. It does do mirroring and you can add any disk you like - USB, SATA, PATA, Hard Disks of any size you have but to get redundancy means telling it to duplicate a directory. This means you need twice as many disks as RAID 5 which uses one extra disk. So in the end I decided to use a Software Raid solution based on the recenylt released Fedora 11 (64 bit release) Linux release which also included Virtualisation support which would al...