Posted on 01/21/2002 5:27:07 PM PST by FatherTorque
I've been here going on 4 years and this is my first vanity post, so the thread police can keep their guns holstered. I need a bit of computer help, I'm going to upgrade and need to know the pros and cons of a few things.
What I have now is:
My computer is a 700 hz Athlon, 512 ram, cd writer, geforce 1, and soundblaster live, I surf and game quite a bit. My wife's computer is a little 300 hz emachine, nothing special, but all she uses it for is email and surfing the net. Windows 2000 is installed on both of them.
I've got cable internet hooked to my computer and I'm using Intel Anypoint USB 10mbps phoneline adapter to network to hers.
OS's I have on hand. Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 2000.
The new one I plan on getting will not have windows XP on it, I'll be going back with 2000. I do want a version of Linux on it as well to try it out. What's the best way to go about this? Partition one drive, or get dual drives and put each OS on it's own drive? Recommendations as to the best flavor of Linux to use? I'll be getting another AMD chip as well, if that makes a difference.
The Anypoint is a pain, because my computer has to be on all the time for hers to have internet access. I just didn't want to run the cat5 at the time. I want to change to either a router or use one of our computers as a server. Anybody have a preference either way? If I go the server route, what software would I want to be running on it, and which one of our older computers should I use as the server? If you think the router is a better idea, do you have a preference as to which one to buy? Keep in mind I'll be running Windows and Linux on mine and will need internet access with both OS's.
Stability and ease of use are the main features I'm looking for. I travel quite a bit with work, and when my wife has computer/networking problems it's hard to troubleshoot them over the phone.
Partition Magic software is great for creating partitions and resizing them afterwards.
If you want to spend the $, you could get VMware, which will allow you to run both Windows and Linux at the same time - not dual boot, but actually run them both at the same time. It's probably overkill if you are just playing around with Linux.
Unless you are already using linux don't, FreeBSD is a better unix and is just as open source (as I flee from the penguin people). Linus does not scale (that is not a typo, ONE guy has to incorporate all the linux kernel updates).
If you don't want to run Cat5 get wireless networking hardware. If you do this make sure you lock it down to only accept communication from your known network hardware (you should be able to give the hardware a list a MAC addresses to respond to, others will be ignored). Use encryption or someone with network hardware in promiscous mode can listen in.
Told ya!
Excellent choice in networking gear! :)
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