April Weekly Project

Published by Guillermo at 4:50 PM under

I have a feeling (more like a very educated guess) that this will be "the" April Weekly project, if nothing else because we are half way through the month.

This is a kick-off of sorts. I'll treat it as such.

I have an older Dell Optiplex GX280 SFF desktop that I will be installing Vista Home Premium on and running for nothing other than (mainly) Media Center. It will live in the family room to manage and display pictures and home videos. On the latter I tend to transfer all video to DVD media rather than back to digital and that in and off itself is looking like a project of its own.

It will run Miro in order to leverage the power of the media on the Internet. I am excited and somewhat surprised that a tool such as this actually supports Vista, but I am not complaining.

Side note: I may be one of the few of "us" professional geek who hasn't fully embraced Vista as my main OS yet, but I have very concrete plans about that which I plan to share here shortly.

The max RAM this board will take is 2GB and as is it currently sports 1GB. Even better news is that of course it consists of 2 x 512MB sticks on 2 available slots, so I'll be losing those. This past Friday I ordered the new RAM, consisting on 2 x 1GB sticks which I got for a pretty good deal (after rebate).

I installed a new 250GB Seagate Drive in it, and a SFF eVGA e-GeForce MX 4000 PCI video card I happened to have for I-have-no-idea-what-reason precisely fitting the small form factor this box requires. I think this should be enough to satisfy my main purpose for this machine.

Part of the project is the hard-wiring of the family room area by a professional firm. Their rate is so reasonable I cannot in my right mind favor the idea of me spending 8 frustrating hours and accomplishing (maybe) a half ass result, over paying someone $200 or $300 and in the end having something that works, looks good and professionally done, and most importantly gives me someone to blame if anything goes wrong :D ... OF COURSE I am just kidding. Accountability and issue ownership and resolution is at the top of my list of traits to continue to work on.

The first step in this project, and until the RAM arrives and the cabling is done, is to start the installation of Vista Home Premium tonight. If time allows (ok, read: If Wife Allows), I'll setup some stuff, play around, etc. But the main goal is to get Vista installed.

This would be a perfect time for me to segue into a deeper analysis of the conceptualization, planning & execution of a simple idea such as this one, and I will, but for now I didn't want to end without expressing how much of a relief it feels like to actually have a concrete, simple and thus doable plan. There is no measure that would allow me to express how much it bothered me to not have done this simply because It wasn't the "perfect" solution, resulting in me never doing it because of excuse after excuse of the self-sabotage kind.

And off we go, installation has begun...

UPDATE: Smallish oversight on my part. The Dell GX280 box I have been working with, does not sport a DVD drive, hence the install took a sudden halt until I figure out what to do about that (of course I assume we all know that Vista installs from a DVD -size- distribution).

Possible solutions that come to mind are to use an external DVD drive, which I don't have and would have to borrow or buy. Another solution is possibly purchasing a DVD drive from eBay for the GX280 or install from a bootable USB flash drive. At all costs, I want to avoid BUYING any other components or soon enough it would have made perfect sense to buy a new machine for this solution, negating the fun inherently part of this project.

FINAL UPDATE: I cover the solution and final project outcome in more detail in the next post.