In an editorial article in Jon Peddie’s TechWatch, my long time friend and collaborator, Dr. Jon himself, makes the point that he thinks that he really needs several PCs to support both home and office.
I was doing this, with a nice T410 ThinkPad for work that I use in my office with a big monitor and keyboard and on the road (I travel a lot). At home, I had an older desktop PC with all the features that I needed a couple of years ago – with fast graphics and raid drives for video editing.
However, increasingly, I have become frustrated with the home machine. I ought to upgrade to Windows 7, as I have been extremely happy with Windows 7 on my notebook, while my home PC has Windows Vista, and is somewhat unreliable, especially with some of the old apps I still use and love. So, I planned an upgraded and updated home machine. But this would cost real money (even though I have a great NEC display and am happy with the keyboard etc) as I like to buy a PC that’s just behind the leading edge, but close, so that I get a decent life from it.
The other issue is maintenance. Just keeping everything upgraded, updated and synchronised can become a real hassle, not to mention the problems of restrictive licence agreements.
I’m very happy with the notebook, so I decided to try an experiment. It has DisplayPort and an eSata connection, so I have added a fast Raid disk drive external box where I can store video files when I’m editing (or games or other things I don’t want on my ‘work’ PC). Archives of the video are on my HP WHS server, to be safe, but access to that is not fast enough for editing and rendering.
Then I got an almost second hand docking station from eBay, so that it’s easy to plug in. So I’m going to be experimenting, for the first time in a good number of years, with only having one PC.
I’ll report back on how things go.
