The laptop we have here is a Gateway that's about 4 years old now.
All the desktop PC's we have here were all completely built from scratch. Most of them use single core AMD Athlon64 CPU's running WinXP MCE, except our HTPC (Home Theater PC) which has an Intel Quad-core CPU in it and is running Windows Vista Home Premium. All of them, including the laptop, have Radeon graphics of varying generations. All the XP systems have 2GB of RAM. The laptop has 1.25GB. The Vista machine has 4GB. They all (except the laptop) also have TV cards in them to record our favorite shows.
We actually have 4 PC's that we aren't using anymore since we moved in January, but they all (except the laptop) have over a terrabyte of HDD space on each of them. We also have a fairly expansive NAS (network attached storage) setup of about 5TB of space where we store backups of important stuff, as well as our music library. We recently took one 500GB NAS unit offline as it didn't agree with Vista for whatever reason.
Most of our PC's are sorely out-of-date by today's standards, but I don't really game on them anymore anyway, other than old emulator stuff, so we don't have any need to really update beyond what we already have. Mostly, we just browse the web, record TV shows and maybe some video or pic editing. Naturally, I suck up any and all interesting DS related goodies, since I've owned a DS from the very beginning, and gaming emulator stuff. But that's about it.
I don't feel like going into all the specific components of our PC's. Not only because I don't remember them all, but because nothing is particularly impressive to talk about anymore.
Basically, my brother puts together the systems (installs the boards and wiring and cards into the case) and I format them and set them up to be used. I guess you could call me the administrator of our little network here. Quite a bit less impressive than it sounds. Believe me.
I'm just self-taught on how to do all this crap from investigating the web and following instructions. I don't have any formal training on any of it. I don't pretend to know everything about PC's and I certainly don't know anything about programming, but I know enough to get them set up and keep the home network and systems going relatively trouble-free. For example, the PC I'm using right now has been running on the same format for over 4 years without an issue. No viruses or other major software issues that I haven't been able to fix myself. It's had a couple hardware issues, but my bro diagnosed and ironed those out pretty quickly and it still runs great to this day.
My brother, on the other hand, is an electronics technician. He used to repair car stereo's, TV's and home stereo equipment for a living. He also frequently creates his own circuits for various uses such as home security, transmitters, signal jammers, patches for what he considered bogus circuits and lots of other stuff I have no clue about. He has all kinds of crazy test equipment everywhere. He knows electronics and can usually tell what a circuit board is all about by studying it for a few minutes, or debug it with his test equipment. But he knows much less than me when it comes to using or setting up PC's, as crazy as that sounds.
Regardless of our differences (he is an anti-gamer, I'm anti-technical), we make a good team to keep our electronic crapola going. He builds it, I set it up and make it work. I think most people would be fairly impressed with all the electronic doo-dads we have going on here.
All the desktop PC's we have here were all completely built from scratch. Most of them use single core AMD Athlon64 CPU's running WinXP MCE, except our HTPC (Home Theater PC) which has an Intel Quad-core CPU in it and is running Windows Vista Home Premium. All of them, including the laptop, have Radeon graphics of varying generations. All the XP systems have 2GB of RAM. The laptop has 1.25GB. The Vista machine has 4GB. They all (except the laptop) also have TV cards in them to record our favorite shows.
We actually have 4 PC's that we aren't using anymore since we moved in January, but they all (except the laptop) have over a terrabyte of HDD space on each of them. We also have a fairly expansive NAS (network attached storage) setup of about 5TB of space where we store backups of important stuff, as well as our music library. We recently took one 500GB NAS unit offline as it didn't agree with Vista for whatever reason.
Most of our PC's are sorely out-of-date by today's standards, but I don't really game on them anymore anyway, other than old emulator stuff, so we don't have any need to really update beyond what we already have. Mostly, we just browse the web, record TV shows and maybe some video or pic editing. Naturally, I suck up any and all interesting DS related goodies, since I've owned a DS from the very beginning, and gaming emulator stuff. But that's about it.
I don't feel like going into all the specific components of our PC's. Not only because I don't remember them all, but because nothing is particularly impressive to talk about anymore.
Basically, my brother puts together the systems (installs the boards and wiring and cards into the case) and I format them and set them up to be used. I guess you could call me the administrator of our little network here. Quite a bit less impressive than it sounds. Believe me.
I'm just self-taught on how to do all this crap from investigating the web and following instructions. I don't have any formal training on any of it. I don't pretend to know everything about PC's and I certainly don't know anything about programming, but I know enough to get them set up and keep the home network and systems going relatively trouble-free. For example, the PC I'm using right now has been running on the same format for over 4 years without an issue. No viruses or other major software issues that I haven't been able to fix myself. It's had a couple hardware issues, but my bro diagnosed and ironed those out pretty quickly and it still runs great to this day.
My brother, on the other hand, is an electronics technician. He used to repair car stereo's, TV's and home stereo equipment for a living. He also frequently creates his own circuits for various uses such as home security, transmitters, signal jammers, patches for what he considered bogus circuits and lots of other stuff I have no clue about. He has all kinds of crazy test equipment everywhere. He knows electronics and can usually tell what a circuit board is all about by studying it for a few minutes, or debug it with his test equipment. But he knows much less than me when it comes to using or setting up PC's, as crazy as that sounds.
Regardless of our differences (he is an anti-gamer, I'm anti-technical), we make a good team to keep our electronic crapola going. He builds it, I set it up and make it work. I think most people would be fairly impressed with all the electronic doo-dads we have going on here.
