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I’m constantly amazed at the price of technology items. Earlier this week, I ordered an HP MediaSmart EX470 Windows Home Server. This little box, recommended to me by Steve, is pretty cool. It comes with a 500 GB hard drive, and AMD processor of some sort and 512 MB of RAM. It runs the Windows Home Server (WHS) operating system and basically handles server functions at home. It has 3 empty hard drive bays that you can fill with your choice of SATA drives to increase your capacity. Mainly I’m getting this because I need a good backup solution for my laptop. I’ve got a ton of data on my laptop that I’d be hosed without. So rather than feeding my laptop endless DVDs to backup to, this is a much more elegant solution. (And another write off just before tax season can’t hurt right?)

Steve turned me on to a website/blog called “Home Server Hacks“. They explain different ways to expand the capabilities of this little device in particluar. A couple of the articles dealt with adding more RAM and installing a faster processor. Now, the device out of the gate was $419.00. I can remember when I bought my last processor, a Pentium III 450 MHz, it cost over $400.00 on it’s own. And don’t even get me started on what I’ve paid for RAM over the past decade or more. So I thought upgrading the RAM and processor must be pretty expensive. As I was researching on Newegg, turns out to upgrade the unit from 512MB of ram to 2GB (4X the RAM) is all of $23.00 and yes, the decimal is in the right spot. WHAT?! So I said, OK well then the processor, an AMD Athlon 64 LE-1640 MUST be at least a couple hundred bucks then right? Nope, $36.00. How is this possible? For less than $60.00 I get 4X the RAM and a processor performance increase of 45%? AWESOME.

So I started researching RAM for my laptop. When I bought my laptop about 1.5 years ago, I got 2GB of RAM (2 X 1GB). There was an option for 4GB (2 X 2GB) but it was an additional $270.00 to do the upgrade. I decided not to. Well now that I’m considering upgrading to Vista Ultimate, I decided to look on Newegg for RAM for the laptop too. 4GB of Laptop RAM ends up costing me $38.00 ($43.00 – $5.00 coupon). HOLY CRAP. Now I’m on a roll. I should upgrade the RAM in my desktop too from 1GB to it’s max of 2GB . . . $41.00 . . . How about a Terabyte drive to go in the new server too!? $99.00 with FREE shipping! WOW!

This is just amazing to me. I just can’t believe it. I can’t wait until they actually start PAYING ME to take the technology off their hands! 🙂 Now to decide if it’s worth upgrading the onboard video on my home machine to an ATI Radeon X1300 256 Mb video card just to run the Windows Vista Aero interface . . . decisions, decisions.