Welcome the New Addition: My Homegrown Windows Home Server Box
Posted by Nam-o | Filed under DIY, Electronics
I’ve always been fascinated of having my own server of some sorts to host your Quake and Duke Nukem Lan games. As a kid, having a server made you feel like a bad ass of some sorts; I guess it was because not everyone in the neighborhood had one. With the advent of Microsoft’s Windows Home Server, my fanatasies of having my own server sprung up out of nowhere.
Since I’ve built and upgraded a good amount of computers during my lifetime, I’ve accumulated a fair amount of computer parts. So why not put it into good use… aka a Windows Home Server!
Here’s my setup:
- AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 2.0ghz Socket 754 Laptop Cpu
- 2 x 512mb Crucial Ballistix DDR 400 Ram
- Samsung EcoGreen F2 5400rpm 1tb Hard Drive
- ASRock K8NF4G-SATA2 Motherboard
- Rosewill RC-411 Gigabit NIC
- Antec Smart Blue 350w PSU
- Lian-Li v351b Case
After reviewing the parts I’ve put together, I was like, “Hummm, this setup should somewhat save me some power since I have a low powered hard drive and a laptop spec cpu.”
I can’t say for sure how much power I’m drawing from the wall until my P3 Kill-a-Watt device comes through. I’ll just have to follow back up with an update with the exact figures. What I’m sure of is that I’m not achieving the reduced power via AMD’s Cool and Quiet and Windows Home Server Power Schemes. After running AMD’s power utility, it appears the cpu does not throttle back to 1ghz; and when I try to utilize a power scheme other than the default, ‘Always On’, the box crashes. Ugh!?
Other than trying to figure out on how to reduce my energy consumption as much as possible, my Windows Home Server box has been great with dishing out my music, pictures and videos out to my Playstation 3. If you’re interested in piping all your media over to your Playstation 3 via the DLNA protocol, give this website a good read: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/streaming. You just need to download two things: Tversity and ffdshow.
If you have some spare parts laying around, try building a neat little Windows Home Server box. There’s a relatively good size WHS community, so do your research and build yourself a cool WHS box.
::Update::
In regards to the power consumption… I’m currently running a different cpu now which is a AMD Sempron 3000+ which have replaced 3200+ laptop cpu. From what my kill-a-watt meter have shown, there’s not much of difference of my power consumption from one cpu to another. At this point of the game, this setup is consuming 70 watts at idle and the highest reading I’ve seen during load is pulling about 85 watts from the wall. Yeah, it was a bit disappointing. 
The real game changer was when I replaced the aging Antec power supply with a brand new SeaSonic S12II 330 watt power supply. After the power supply swap, the kill-a-watt reported 51 watts during idle and 72 watts during load; what a difference an 80+ certified power supply will do!
Tags: amd, media, ps3, windows home server
Nam Builds a Robot
Posted by Nam-o | Filed under DIY
During my hourly blog visit routine, I ran across this cool looking picture of robots at the gizmodo site and I was like, “Thist would be a cool and fun project to do!”
The sad thing is that I decided to commit to this project on the 30th of October. Yeah, I’m not giving myself a whole lot of time for any type of creativity. So, I had to start collecting boxes pronto!
So, without further adieu, here is the project breakdown..
Basic Materials:
- Card Board Boxes
- Duct Tape
- Box Cutter
- Robot Spray Paint (Silver)Dryer Duct or something similar for arms and legs
Unless you’re making robots for an 8 year old child, tracking down cardboard boxes to fit an adult sized frame is a lot harder than you may think. The easiest place to hunt down adult-sized boxes would be your local 24 hour Super Wal-Mart. Make sure you visit the “domestic” department (where the appliances and pillows live) between the stocking hours of 1am to 6am. Sure, you could visit the food isles for your cardboard needs but the boxes tend to a bit thin and you could potentially end up smelling like lunch meat.
Once you gather all of your components and materials, utilize the box cutter to cut your robot’s eyes, mouth, and any other openings. Then head over to a well ventilated area and grab that spray can of Robot Spray Paint to dress up your robot. Don’t worry if the outside of boxes have any shipping labels or stickers as these elements will give off a DIY, homemade look. Since you’re painting cardboard, the paint’s baking time should only take approximately 30 to 45 minutes.
After the baking period, test fit your new creation, make any minor adjustments, and then go out to do some interplanetary domination; Ironman style!! RAWR!!
Tags: DIY, halloween, homemade, ironman, rawr, robot, tony stark, walmart
