Those dedicated units leave much to be desired. I'm especially not a DM fan. Even the ones I don't have a problem with aren't equal to PC based systems.
Mike I know I could combine some of those servers, you might have to upgrade hardware.
This is based on you wanting to actually record the video, if you don't want to do that you don't need any PC hardware or a dedicated DVR.
upstatemike said:
I have a dedicated music server, a dedicated HS automation server, and a dedicated PowerHome/Weather Station server all running 24/7.
Really with top of the line hardware you could probably run it all on one box plus a hardware based CCTV system if you wanted. I would still think you could run all three of your current processes on 1 P4 D box.
You should bring up your task manager on each box and see how much of your resources you are really using. I know lots of you guys (well me too!) hang onto old hardware. If those are maxed out 333mhz/64MB boxes a motherboard+CPU+RAM upgrade would get some if not all of them combined. That obviously assumes you don't have ISA devices or really picky PCI devices. In power consumption I assume it would pay for the upgrade eventually.
You might Ghost a backup of each OS disk and then play with combining them.
I have never tried the MS XP transfer but it has app for transfering stuff from one PC to another. Once you have a good Ghost image you can try doing the transfer to combine 2 at a time. I have very little faith in it working but geeze if it did it wouldn't take you an hour.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/s...november12.mspx
That article specifically says you have to install the software itself on the new machine but it's configuration should be automatically transfered if it's in the program files directory or manually selected.
What are you using as your music server? Mine is just a fileserver, the clients use Winamp, WMP, MCE or Beyond Media and keep their own library info. I use Exact Audio Copy to Rip the disks to the server locally but you could do it over your network from more advanced clients. If you use that method you don't have much system resources. If you do music on demand you will have more load. Mine is actually doing pictures, music and video (TV, DVDs and CCTV) but it's not transcoding anything so CPU is low.