My Home Network

In case you care...

I have an extensive bunch of computer stuff in my home network. Believe it or not I kind of get a kick about all the stuff I have. So, let me tell you what I have for hardware and software...

My Hardware:

Dell XPS 410
• 2.4 Core 2 Duo - I’m thinking about upgrading the CPU to a quad core.
• 4 GB of RAM
• 512 Nvidia Graphics card
• Two 500 GB Western Digital Caviar drives mapped as c: and d: – My c: drive is for my OS, applications, general data and pictures. My d: drive is solely for my iTunes library and my Windows swap file.
• Two DVD/CD RW drives. I can rip two DVDs at the same time!
• Samsung 2234GW 22inch monitor
• Firewire and a bunch of USB ports
• Wireless Microsoft Intellitouch 5000 keyboard
• Wireless Logitech LX8 Cordless Laser Mouse – I had a MS Intellipoint mouse but the scroll wheel wouldn’t work with iTunes so I got the Logitech.

ScanSnap S510 – my scanner is my file cabinet. I hate paper.

Canon i950 – the best photo printer for the money

Canon 4200 flatbed scanner with backlit slide and negative scanning

Brother HL-2170W network attached laser printer. My HP1020 laser didn’t play nice on my network – I gave it to my parents

500 GB Western Digital network attached storage – main backup for all my computers. I really need to get a DROBO with a couple of terabytes (Mela?).

250 GB Western Digital My Passport USB drive – quick backup of my pictures

D-Link DIR-628 N router – my wife’s laptop is only using G. I got the draft N router in preparation for getting an AppleTV. With draft N wifi hopefully you can stream video.

My old Dell Dimension 4400. Ubuntu Linux machine. This is Andrew’s computer. He can play games, watch videos and surf the web.

Dell Latitude D520. This is Mela’s laptop. I upgraded it to 4 GB of RAM.


My Software:

Vista Home Premium on my computer. XP Professional on my wife’s laptop. Ubuntu on Andrew’s computer.

iTunes – 200+ gigabytes of music, podcast, audio books and videos

Quicken 2008 Deluxe – I reconcile every day. I scan my receipts, statements and invoices to PDF files. Quicken Deluxe allows me to attach PDFs to the actual transactions and to the accounts. I have my finances tracked back to 1/1/1999.

ACDSee 10 – tracks my entire photo library going back to 1999. I have a folder for each year. Inside that folder I have a folder for each month. Every picture I take during a given month is put in that month’s folder. At the end of the month I burn it all to a DVD. I use SyncToy to backup all my pictures on a nightly basis to my USB drive and my NAS.

Adobe Acrobat Standard 8 – like I said, I scan everything to PDF. I’m able to print directly to PDF files

Office 2007 – Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access and Publisher

SyncToy 2.0 Beta from Microsoft – this is the best backup software and it’s free. SyncToy basically synchronizes folders. You pick a folder on your main system (the left) and match it to a folder on a backup drive (the right). On the leftI have my documents folder matched to a backup documents folder on the right. SyncToy will echo all the files on the left to the right. I have this running nightly on my network will all my computers. I highly recommend backing up data this way!!

Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 – I have a cracked copy of Photoshop CS2 (the full version of Photoshop) but I don’t have it installed.

Adobe Premier Elements 4 – this makes videos. I really don’t know how to use it. I need to learn. They say it’s pretty fun.

Slysoft – the best DVD ripping software in the world. This software alone is the main reason I haven’t switched to a Mac. They don’t have a Mac version. There are three Slysoft programs I use:
• AnyDVD – this is a program that lives in your system tray. When you put a DVD in your drive it detects it and decrypts it automatically.
• AnyDVDMobile – this program will take the decrypted DVD and rip it to a MPEG 4 files that can be imported into iTunes. This program can rip to many different formats: mpeg, wma, avi, divx or whatever.
• AnyDVDClone – this will clone a DVD to another DVD.