+/-

good or bad

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1220949&CatId=1223

over all how good is this computer?

what i want to use it for?

network domain server, music server, LAN file server etc.

why is it so cheap? is it just because that's what it is? CHEAP? or will it be not to bad just sitting around being a low to mid demand server?

 

I have one word for you. CELERON. *eeeughh*.

For that sort of thing you don't need that sort of spec. There is NO point in getting that graphics card, for a start. For servers, cheap is good. If its so cheap, you can replace it easily.

I'd get a motherboard/CPU package like this: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicat...etails.asp?EdpNo=1166612&Sku=MBM-7NJL6-XP2900
And the cheapest AGP graphics card you can possibly find. Like one of these
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=235814&CatId=873
Then I'd get a crapload of ram, like this:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1070726

If you were really worried about networking, you could get a Sever NIC as well, but I think thats a little needless for a home/small office situation.

I'd recommend if you wanted a higher demand server, get ECC ram, and if you buy more than one stick make sure its paired. The more users, the more ram . If you max out your ram, only THEN do you need to upgrade the CPU.

Thats what you're looking for in a server: bottlenecks. And the first one is usually RAM. If you have 10/100 MBit networking, you should be fine with that.

 

That's still pretty dirt cheap though

 

Oh and another suggestion: If you're going to use it for file storage only, I would very much recommend you use Linux. Particularly Debian.

Right now I'm using a really old Celeron 700 machine with a 200GB HDD (lol) with about 64MB of ram to stream music over the network. Couldn't put win2k on it, cause its not got enough system memory. Tried to put windows 98 on it, no joy either, it ran but it was so slow that you couldn't stream music from it.

Downloaded the net install debian CD, fired it up, got it installed, (the install took about 12 hours on my connection though, left it on overnight) and configured samba, disabled pretty much everything else, and now I have a network share mapped to drive Z: on here. Music streams flawlessly