Caleb Hunt (.com)

People ask me frequently what my home network setup is like, so here it is:

So a couple months ago I decided to pull the trigger and build myself a new desktop PC after my LG R200 laptop just was no longer cutting it in the realms of speed / capacity. It served it’s time well for my mobile days of traveling to/from school, but just couldn’t hack editing RAW images in Photoshop/Lightroom. Here’s what I ended up with:

Processor: Intel E8400 stock at 3GHz w/ Arctic Cooling Freezer PRO HSF
Motherboard: Gigabyte EP45-UD3p
RAM: 4GB G-Skill PC-8500 RAM
HDD: 1TB WD Black
Video: XFX Radeon 4850 w/1GB ram
OS: Windows 7 Beta

This is my first Intel build since, well… a PIII 733 waaaay back in the day. I’ve yet to OC, but that’s on tap for the future. I re-used my Antec case from my AMD X2 3800 build back in ’05 and picked up a 700 Watt Modular Power Supply from FS. One of the reasons I wanted to do a desktop (despite desktop PC’s being dead) was to take advantage of dual displays. I ended up getting a great deal on a couple Samsung Syncmaster 2343BW’s. These each have a 16×9 resolution that support 2048×1152 – that’s two 8.5×11 pieces of paper side by side. There’s tons of screen real-estate which is fantastic, even though one of them is already going back to Samsung for an exchange because of a faulty DVI display port.

So that’s my desktop, next on the docket – the Media Centre. I’m a huge fan of the HTPC (Home Theatre PC). This is our always-on, always-accessible PC that houses the majority of our media. It has our MP3′s (incl iTunes library), movies, TV, runs our torrents, stores our pictures etc. It’s evolved into much more than simply a “media streamer” which was it’s intended purpose when I picked up an Acer Aspire desktop PC with a dual core Athlon X2 3600+ a year 1/2 ago. It’s now been supped up with a:

Processor: AMD Phenom X3 720 Black Edition Processor @ 2.8GHz
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-SH2 (w/ AMD 780G onboard video that handles HD content flawlessly)
RAM: 4GB G-Skill PC-8500
HDD: 2 x 250GB Seagate, 1 x 1TB Samsung and I need to replace a 500GB external that died on the weekend (moral of the story… BACK IT UP)
OS: Windows XP Pro (to be upgraded in the near future)
Display: Samsung Aquos 32″ 720P LCD TV

Megan uses this PC (that is also our TV in the living room) as her main computer. The next upgrade for this will be a new PC case… I think I’m going to pick up an Antec Sonata III (just did a desktop build for a client, and it’s a quality case).

I still have my LG R200 Laptop which I use on a frequent basis, though not as regularly as the other PC’s.

Another gadget that’s attached to our network to house even more media is our HP EX470 Windows Home Server. It’s currently stuffed with a 500 GB Seagate HDD and 2 x 1TB Western Digital Green hard drives at the present time and acts as even more storage for our HTPC to stream from.

Our ISP is Nexicom, unlimited ADSL+ traffic – highly recommended. It’s coming into a Linksys WRT54GL router with Tomato firmware on it (turns your $50 router into a $200+ router) and all our networked PC’s are running off a GBE Dlink switch.

So there you have it.

First off, I appologize that this didn’t get posted “live” as I had originally thought it would. Turns out that internet availability, sleep and time were all very precious commodoties while I was away and all three were hard to come by while overseas.

Second… It takes time, effort and energy to edit photo’s. I haven’t been too good at finding all three. But I promise, its coming….