Shri Shrikumar wrote:
On Sat, 2003-03-15 at 11:20, Jan Willem Stumpel wrote: [...]I should have thought that there must be a market for such a thing, with so many people running home networks, but so far I haven't found any suppliers of things like this. Maybe I haven't been looking in the right places. Any ideas?There is no real point for this market. The lowest spec machine brand new probably cost around £250(Probably around $250 in the US) without monitor. With this as the price for a machine with probably 1.2Ghz, 512Mb RAM and 40Gb Hard drive - who wants to pay more than around£50 for an old 500Mhz with 128Mb RAM . If you skip the hard drive, you could probably save another $50 but I wouldn't recommend this - the new harddrives are *very* big and *much* faster. Something else you can do is replace one of your other machines with a new one and put that as the server - I did this a couple of times. Very worthwhile. HTH, Shri
Something that I have been mulling over is building something like this out of the "mini-ITX" Motherboard. I got one of these MBs for my son last Christmas, and he obtained a special-made case for it. He is using it for the center of a homemade "arcade" game machine, but it could also be easily used for a home lan router/firewall/etc. The whole setup is significantly smaller than any current "regular" computer that you can buy. It has decent specs and doesn't use a fan so it is quiet. There isn't any room for expansion cards, but that should't be a factor for you.
I think the cost of this MB + case was about $250 as Shri indicated above. That cost would go up depending upon Memory, etc.
The link to the main site is: http://www.mini-itx.com/. You can Google for other sources around the net. We got the MB from: http://www.cyberguys.com and got quite decent (timely) service from them.
Just another idea... Cheers, -Don Spoon-