Hello. I am considering purchasing a computer for a website developement environment and have found a referbished Dell 830 server with more RAM and Harddrive space than many of the new desktop computer I am finding. It's is very low cost too. Is it wise to use a server to install my OS (Windows Vista Business) on and use it as a home computer? Are servers just hopped up desktops. This may seem like a basic question but I just don't know that much about the difference. Thanks in advance.
Welcome to HWF Windows Vista eats up way too much resources to be used as a server. Instead, I'd suggest to install a version of Linux on it. Ubuntu Server Edition and Debian are good choices for that. The computer must use its resources to manage traffic and not the Operating System, therefore the less resources an OS uses, the best performance you'll get on your network.
I'm not really concerned about traffic as I am not setting up a home network. I just want a computer that has plenty of resources for website design and application developement that can also connect to the internet to test my deployments. I was supprised at the hardware resources these servers have and are less expensive than new computers. I'm using WAMP right now on my Vista machine. Does Ubuntu support apache server configurations? Thanks for your time.
So you're asking if you can use a server as a home computer? Yes this is possible without any problem. (didn't read your post thoroughly). Servers usually have a fast CPU and a great amount of RAM, sacrificing graphics performance though. Yeah it does, and is very good at it too
I'm sure it's possible to upgrade the graphics card. At least I would hope. I will be dealing with photos and graphics software.
You don't understand ANYTHING of that what you wanna do. Just drop it. Or start thinking. Here some clues: You've allready got the first nice thing - Business Vista. It means you can downgrade to XP. Almost any PC (until 5 years old) will be enough with XP running (usually worst case - need to add RAM). For testing purposes you don't need to buy another PC. If you want to host the pages you make - depends how many. And it depends on your internet connection. You can host something starting with 2Mbps upload. The more pages*hites the more upload you need. And consider that hosting 1 webpage usually doesn't even cover the electricity bill P.S. I have about 10 domain names (e-mailes and webpage) on 15Mbps, average load is 1Mbps. Ubuntu server edition on a 1.something celeron with 512Mb RAM and 3 IDE disks, system and 2 for data. Non-raid, just RSync snapshots.
