well, i bought a 250 gb hard drive and a dvd-rom drive for one of the two junkers that i have lying around.
unfortunately, as it turns out, the intel al440lx motherboard only accepts 384 mb of ram. the other clunker has the same motherboard as well.
when did intel think that 384 mb of ram would be all that you needed -- especially when they make pc133 ram in the 512 mb variety? (i understand that 512 mb sticks were made available after the fact, of course)
the machine meets all of the other requirement of windows home server but they are not releasing new bios updates for this motherboard.
128 mb short and i have to buy a new case, motherboard, power supply, cpu, and memory to reclaim the investment of the hard drive and dvd-reader build a windows home server.
plain and simple, that sucks.
on a related note, we really need to slow down the pace of software "advancement" until we figure out a way to effectively recycle outdated computer equipment.
i was going to recycle an old machine but i couldn't because of the 128 mb gap.
to throw out a completely irrelevant and inaccurate analogy, it's like having to throw away a $2000 suit because you wanted your suit to match a new tie you bought. (hey, i said the analogy wasn't going to make sense)