My old Linux box keeled over and died on me on the weekend, I’ve narrowed the problem down to either a bad motherboard or CPU, and it’s far too old to bother replacing individual parts on it, so I’ve gone ahead and ordered a replacement system. I’m kind of tired of assembling my own systems, for once.
It’s hard to find something that perfectly suits my needs: I wanted something that was small, quiet, capable of recording TV, could have lots of storage, had DVI or HDMI video output, and a powerful enough CPU to do some video work (potentially playing HD in the future). There are a lot of options that fulfill *some* of those requirements, but not *all* of them. The Dell Studio Hybrid lacked eSATA or FireWire 800, so storage would have been slow. The HP Slimline only had 100Mbit Ethernet. The Mac Mini is getting old and a potential refresh is too far away. And so on…
I eventually settled on the Dell Vostro 220s. The base spec isn’t perfect, and it’s a bit bigger than the Studio Hybrid, but the inadequacies can be overcome via the PCI/PCIe slots. I upgraded the video card and ordered a low-profile TV tuner card, which takes care of the DVI/HDMI and TV recording. There’s two internal bays, so storage won’t be a problem, and I can add an eSATA card later on if I want fast external storage.
It could be a few weeks before the new system arrives and is set up though, so for now I ripped the main boot/home drive out of the old server and have it running it on my gaming box. It actually booted straight off of a USB enclosure and ran with no major problems (just some device names changing), other than being a little on the slow side…