[vox] Just for fun...

[Richard S. Crawford]

At home I have a computer that acts as a file/print/web/mail server.  It
runs Red Hat 8, PHP, PostGreSQL, Apache 2, Samba, and so on, and so on. 
The computer itself is an old 486 with 40GB of hard drive space and
128MB of RAM (both of which I plan on increasing soon).  The computer
probably cost about $1200 when it was new, but now it's old and you
probably wouldn't be able to buy its ilk at a store anymore (it was my
wife's old computer).  But I imagine I could buy it pretty cheap from a
friend or family member or used computer shop for less than $500.  Red
Hat 8 cost me about $80.  Red Hat was pretty much ready to go once it
was installed and all of the updates had been applied.  Cost of setup:
less than $600. 

Just for fun, I decided to figure out how much such a server would cost
if it were a Windows machine.  I got as far as Windows XP Professional:
$299.99 ($199.99 for home edition), realized that it wouldn't run at all
well on this clunker computer and that I'd need a new computer to go
with the operating system, and pretty much gave up on it there.

But just for giggles... how much would I have paid to set up an
equivalent server on a Windows platform, including the ability to log in
remotely and make adjustments (it's very easy to fix my Linux server
right now with SSH), I wonder?
-- 
Slainte,
Richard S. Crawford
AIM: Buffalo2K / Y!: rscrawford / ICQ: 11640404
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