What exactly do you do with them?  I have some laptops lying around that I might want to put to good use.

I use mine primarily as a media server, it records shows and I just watch them off of the server over WiFi. I haven’t had a need to update to 802.11g yet, since I get a solid 500-600KB/s over 802.11b, more than enough for any MPEG1/DivX stream. I also use the server to do quick backups of files just in case (I lost 120GB of work a couple of years back and have been really careful since then).

I kind of wish I did something cooler with mine.  It’s just for basic AD authentication, DNS, file storage and as a development server for Web/DB projects.

If I set up my own email server I would become a small business shop.  :cry:

That was me -
AP

I have a couple and they all serve different purposes. My main server is mostly used for file serving and I store everything on there. It houses all of my media files, documents, and almost everything I’ve done. Every couple of years, I buy a brand new hard disk (bigger of course) and dump everything on there. This same server hosts some basic web and ftp services so I can access it from wherever.

Internally, I have another server that’s used for development. This is where I test different web/app/directory servers and do programming work on it. I also have VMWare installed on it so that I can play with other OSes and load up different versions of different web/application servers.

So, they’re pretty handy to have.

Isn’t anyone running Gigabit ethernet?

I just picked up a new Server about a month ago and it has 10/100/1000. My current network is only 10/100 and I wanted to know if you guys think it’s worth overhauling my systems.

It would require a new router and about 7 new 10/100/1000 desktop cards {my notebooks aren’t that important}

Erik

I am not a believer in Gigabit to the desktop. My file transfers are only marginally slower from my server than from my desktop’s hard drive on 100baseT. If you’re running NAS or have app servers querying a DB server over the network, do it ASAP, but I don’t think even geeks need it for the most part.

I agree with Drachen. Gigabit really isn’t that big of a deal for desktops right now. Unless you’re constantly doing heavy transfers all the time it probably isn’t worth it. 100Mb/s is 12.5MB/s which is pretty decent even though most modern hard disks are exceeding that limit.

There’s also an issue with Gigabit cards on older systems in that they require higher CPU usage…so you may want to consider that.

Oh, and if you want slightly faster transfers (and your computers are close enough), use a firewire cable. You can get 400Mb/s (50MB/s) transfer rate. I find that to be my quick fix when I need to transfer huge amounts of data. Luckily, all of my systems have firewire in some from or another.

Well my server is a DB and I did create custom apps on my desktop to query the server all the time…but it’s usually for tiny bits of data, nothing huge.

Thats the one thing I hate about technology, when you have something in your system you don’t use you try to justify a need to use it {and spend more money}.

Thanks for you opinions…

Erik