OK so now I have decided at last what I am going to do upgrade-wise, and it will be implemented over the rest of this year, I hope. The plan is simply to upgrade in that Foxconn TS001 chassis by replacing the mainboard, CPU and RAM. I will possibly buy a SSD and maybe replace the 4th HDD with a bigger one. There are a number of different options I can have, but for working on server builds, Windows 8 has Hyper-V built into it, which offers enough functionality to build and maintain servers if you wish, or you could dual boot to Windows Server on the same machine and run Hyper-V on that. The big problem I just discovered with my current PC is that the CPU, while it is 64 bit capable and has VT-x built in, does not support SLAT, which is now the minimum standard for Hyper-V on the latest edition of Windows. Therefore while this computer can run Windows 8 OK it is not much use for anything else and doesn’t really have enough RAM to do Hyper-V while Windows 8 is running. Therefore I’m going for the cheapest upgrade option, which I will get prices for and then implement by buying the components needed over coming months. The current plan for the old board, CPU and memory is to scrounge an old desktop chassis from somewhere and have an actual physical computer running Windows 8 at one of my workplaces to work with instead of a thin client remotely logging in. It turns out that SLAT wasn’t introduced until the Intel core i7 desktop CPU. I hope that the CPU is not going to be too dear, but when I set up this computer a couple of years ago, LGA1155 looked too dear overall which was why I went for LGA775, now that is obsolete.
At the moment I am without broadband at home and this will continue probably for several more days. In the block of flats I am in, the phone cable goes through the ceilings of other flats to get to mine. Apparently someone has damaged or cut through the cable in one of the other flats, probably when repairs were being done over the last few days. Chorus have to be able to get into those other flats to be able to fix the cable before they can get my broadband on which could take several days to organise. I found that my phone can be used as a mobile wireless access point which saved me a lot of inconvenience last evening, but the data is quite expensive. As my current mobile plan expires soon it’s time to start looking for something else and perhaps I should be going onto a Vodafone plan instead of Telstra, as they are the same thing now anyway. Probably the best option will be $55 naked broadband and $40 basic mobile smart plan together. This only gives 250 MB a month which is slightly more than what I get now. Going onto their broadband will have to wait until the Telstraclear contract period under which the modem was supplied free, expires, unless they allow me to transfer it. The next option up for data is $70 per month for 1 GB, or alternatively, buying extra data casually when needed. The same sort thing can be done by buying a Vodem, the latter has the advantage that it doesn’t tie up the phone and run its battery down and will work on any computer. It might be worth buying a Vodem and using it on prepay for those times when broadband fails, especially good option if I don’t have a landline any more. These days we have lots more options for when power fails and so on, so in the event of another big earthquake I would have the ability to do a lot more things than I could before, but of course we always hope such a thing never happens.