How Many Computers do you Have in your House?

How Many Computers do you Have in your House?

Show Notes

Chris Pirillo »How Many Computers do you Have in your House?Posted 12 minutes ago

Hmm…let’s see….

Two top-end computers in our home office (for my wife and I — we run our own business), one in my son’s room, one backup/file server-type of older PC and three laptops (one goes back and forth to my son’s school).

So yeah…we’re geeks! ;)

I now have eleven computers. Going from an 8088 to and XP2800. My main computer is an overclocked XP2100. I use the XP2800 as a file storage computer with 430GB of HD space. Another XP2100 does dual boot duty with 98SE and XP Pro for old games. A P3-800EB runs an XP / Ubuntu dual boot to play with different Linux distros. And I have two PCs outside to provide streaming audio in my backyard and BBQ patios. Also have a Gateway Tablet PC and a nine year old IBM PII-366 laptop that works great. (Even does wireless.) The rest of hte parts are spares or will be refurbished into comptuers to be given away.

I was faced with this decision very recently. In the end I decided to go for two machines for resource intensive activities (a windows box for audio/video production, composing music), and a Linux box for development/scientific computing. However, if I was doing pure server side stuff and I had a 2 CPU, each with two cores, I would probably virtualize

Different strokes for different folks. Myself, I’m running 2 machines most of the time. One is an older desktop that I use mainly for design. The other, and somehow it’s become my main unit, is an HP pavillion laptop that I use for everything else. It works for me at this point.

My main PC was, up until last Thursday, an old AMD Duron 750MHz w/ 512 MB ram. It dual booted Windows XP Home and the latest flavor of Ubuntu.

I played with a secondary PC, a 300MHz Pentium of sorts with 64 MB ram. It was running the Ubuntu server edition to play with LAMP.

I floated a laptop between home/school/fiance’s place. It’s a 2.8GHz Pentium (hp zv5320ca) w/ 512 MB ram.

Last Thursday I got a new PC w/ AMD 64 X2 6000+ processor and 2×1GB ATI crossfire ram.

What do I need all these computers for? The 750 Duron is my main “upstairs” PC for when I’m in my living room. The Laptop is meant for portable computing and has a spot reserved beside my bed. The old 300MHz is just for playing around with a server. The latest is my gaming PC and I’ve parked it at my fiance’s place as that’s where I spend most of my daylight hours outside of work and school.

One computer could not do all of that.

I agree with Chris. If you operate the virtual machine properly, everything should work fine! How many computers do you have Chris?

I have 6 computers (not counting relics such as the CoCo-3 in a cardboard box somewhere).

1. The regular PC – dual-core 3.0Ghz 2gb ram Kubuntu / Vista. Gets beat up pretty badly in the run of a day.

2. Old system. Kubuntu / Vista. Testing / play / storage. 2.4@3Ghz 1GB ram.

3. AMD-700. This is my router / VPN / firewall / IDS. Running the amazing pfSense ( http://www.pfsense.org ) software. Simply amazing.

4. Celeron 2.4 512mb (soon to be 768 I think). This is my phone server. Running asterisk / freepbx. Not fully deployed yet; but it’s been running and getting me cheap long distance for over a year.

5. 2.4@2.8; 512mb ram. Kubuntu / mythtv. Tv recording box. It’s been ‘broken’for awhile but still running as it is a remote access using ssh / ipsec via the pfSense box. The TV recording has been somewhat broken – audio troubles. Just not enough time in a day to get around to fix it. Maybe the upgrade to Gutsy will fix it. I’ll know soon.

6. Laptop; Acer core2; 2gb ram. Just for surfing the net when I don’t want to go to the basement where my main lair is.

Two of those often run virtual machines so that I can play with other things; Solaris OpenBSD whatever. Mostly I use VM’s to boot live iso’s and see how they run; or testing installs of things.

My previous comment got garbled somehow.

2. Old system. P4 2.4@3 ghz. XP / Kubuntu. Storage / play / testing.

3. AMD-700. Firewall / router / IDS / VPN. Running pfSense. Amazing software.

etc….

Ah; it keep messing up my comment. Stupid at sign I think.

2. Old system. 2.4 ghz p4 running at 3 ghz. Testing / play / storage.

3. amd-700 running the amazing pfSense. Firewall + router + IDS + VPN. http://www.pfsense.org . Great software.

I think its best to have dedicated systems for various tasks. In my home, I utilize 13 systems.

Hello!

Few months ago I posted about ‘easy computers’. Here’s the link I wanted to share with you

http://www.andreavascellari.com/blog/?p=217

These cheap computers are produced by a Thailand-based company.
According to what Forbes reports, this seems to be a good respond not only to the needs of all those customers that don’ t need special features or constant updates, but also to one group of McDonald’s restaurants that bought 1,200 to set up their wi-fi networks.

I’m convinced that there is a huge market for this generation of ‘easy computers’

Love the show,

Andrea

Two development PCs, an Apple Mac G4 just for testing websites on Safari, and an HP Business Notebook laptop to keep the girls out of the office! ;-)

Down at my pad we then have the Apple MacBook which downloads all day, outputting to a modded Xbox and ethernet hard drives…

We have three that are used daily, plus two laptops and a PDA.

Hubby has an XP machine; I have an XP laptop and a MacBook Pro, G4 with OSX; My main machine is my intel iMac with OSX, running win2K on Parallels for quick access to a couple of my old timey proggies. And Chuzzle. Plus I haven’t sprung for an office suite for the Mac yet and need my Office 2000 for the few times that Office.org doesn’t live up to snuff for what I want to do. Sitting next to my iMac is my former main PC, Intel 2800 P4 running XP Pro, but with a swappable drive for my Linspire and any other OS I want to play with. The PDA runs PocketPC 2003. Oh, an older machine in the garage that I haven’t turned on for a while that I think has win98 on it…. Haven’t decided what I’ll do with it yet.

I think if I had my “druthers” and was limited to only one machine, I would run a Mac for primary with an XP partition running in coherence mode, but have a swappable drive for anything I might want to play with on a whim. I’m fairly new to Mac so haven’t yet experimented with external booting drives. That, too, could be an option. I thought I could do with just a Mac, but am still looking for replacement programs that can do what I want to do HOW I want to do it.

I am small potatoes. I have only 5 computers in my house.
2 Linux Machine, one for a Gateway, One for web crawling, and interaction
2 Windows XP Machines , one for those things that require windows for my customers, and one for gaming for my my son.
All of these were white boxes that I basically ordered piecemeal, and put together ourselves.

I run 4 pc’s and 2 laptops. One pc is dedicated strictly for a webcam that I run. One pc is my wifes and one is mine in our office. I have one i use in the basement to look up things for one of my hobbies. One laptop is the one i take on trips and use other places around home. One older laptop is used in garage for use with other hobbies to look up information.
Plus have a wireless pda.

Somewhere in between.

My “main” machine is a dual core, dual screen XP64 box, running the bare essentials. Office, Photoshop, Firefox and a few other things. By and large any apps that I want to run that are even remotely non-mainstream will get shoved into a VM on that box. Especially things like mIRC, or uTorrent. I want to keep it as clean as humanly possible, and so far, the machine has been rock-solid since it isn’t loaded down with all manner of random DLL hell, etc. And that box will never get ANY games installed on it, beyond what comes w/ Windows.

My “game” machine will be just that. Dedicated to gaming. Nothing particularly specatacular performance-wise. I don’t play FPS or games of that ilk. Perfectly happy playing things like Civ 3 and Settlers 2, even. Eventually this will get replaced by a box for SupCom tho.

A laptop that’s loaded down with tons of work, and personal stuff that I haul everywhere.

A Snapstream PVR that I would never consider adding any additional functions to. When it’s got all 6 tuners humming at once, there’s not much to spare in the way of cycles.

A “server” for anything that’s ostensibly shared. Or just more long-term storage as well. Eventually this will get rebuilt into a box capable of running VM’s so I can put Exchange on it, and whatnot.

VM’s are a killer tech. But they aren’t the answer to every problem, and they can’t even remotely replace every machine. They’re just one more tool in the box, to take care of certain needs.

* Decent desktop workstation: Intel Core Duo 4400 with 4GB of RAM, dual booting Vista Business and Ubuntu64. Dual 22″ LCD’s.
* Headless VMWare server 3.0GHz/2GB of RAM hosting multiple Ubuntu virtual machines including my personal mail server and development web servers.
* HTPC hooked up to the HDTV and running MediaPortal on XP Pro.
* Basic XP workstation 2.8Ghz/1.5GB for our exchange student to use.
* Old corporate cast-off machine running Smoothwall Linux firewall
* Dell 700m laptop running Ubuntu
* Powerbook G4
* Wife’s Dell laptop
* Off-brand Windows laptop

All of them are set up so that you can pretty much sit down at any one of them, but work remotely on any one of the others.

And, I suppose, technically, you could count the 3 dual-tuner satellite Tivo’s as well as they’re actually Linux boxes.

i have 7 computers If you count my Palm TX as one

1 pam TX
1 Ubuntu Desktop
1 XP Media Center Desktop
1 Vista Premium Desktop
1XP Home Laptop
1 Mac Mini
1 MacBook
the videos you see me do on You tube are ALL done with the MacBook

I own two computers…only bc i can’t afford more! I have a laptop and a desktop. My gf had a desktop also. In our living room we have (from left to right) monitor, monitor, tv. We only have PC’s but i am seriously considering a mac, probably mac mini if they come out with a new design. I want something that will run fast forever. will keep the desktop PC for storage.

Virtual Machines are awesome for testing stuff at home, but where they really come into their own is in the enterprise. For example, at work we have 1 physical server with 4 quad core processors and 16GB of ram running 20 virtual servers. That is one killer machine! With all the servers running, CPU usage averages around 20-50%

Let me correct that last post…. 2 quad core processors (got carried away :-)