[continued from part2]

at the time of writing this blog I'm using the WIndows 7 Release Candidate which is essentially a free download for IT Pointy heads to play with, test, experience and provide feedback regarding the latest and greatest offering from Microsoft.

I'm not aligned with any one operating system (apart from the fantastic IBM i5/OS of course ;) ) and recommend to most friends that they use the operating system that best suits there needs.

A few weeks ago I picked up a Dell 400SC Poweredge server for the ridiculous price of $150 on Craigslist. It was being advertised by a chap who had inherited it from a business, wiped it and then installed Windows XP: Even though it's a server you can install XP on the 400SC relatively easy and most drivers work straight away. But it runs like a dog. A one legged one.

Shannon Elizabeth has nothing to do with this except I am watching her play Poker on Youtube at the moment and think shes lovely  ;)

So, aforementioned gentlemen thought it was a duff PC and advertised it on Craigslist hoping to offload it for a few dollars and to pass the headache onto someone else. The guy selling it thought he was selling a dud machine, and it turns out it was just his installation of a hooky copy of XP with forced drivers (the wrong ones) that was the problem. Nice.

Great opportunity for me - especially as I was looking for a cheap little Media Server for my home network. A little haggling and the Dell is in the back the car heading back to the house for a weekend of serious tinkering.

So what did I get for my money?

I got a Dell Poweredge 400SC Server with 2.4Ghz 320GB hdd, 1GB ram and a snappy 21inch flat panel... upgrade time straight away so I slapped in another 3GB of ram and a 500GB Drive in slot2. The integrated graphics card works OK but as there is an AGP slot in there thats empty:

• A Graphics Card on Ebay for $20 (RADEON 9600 XT AGP 256MB) - it's not a mind blowing card but it sure kicks the arse of the nasty 8mb thing that comes as standard.
• Some USB Speakers for $20 at BestBuy - these things are excellent. Just plug them into the USB, self powered and play nice and loud. double thumbs up.

Now it's time to play with it and see how I'm going to use it to store all my Music and serve my other media (pictures, movies etc..) into my home wireless network.

Anti-Virus software and a Firewall are absolutely essential in order to avoid having your computer system hacked, disabled, or worse. There are a variety of sources these attacks can originate from, such as web pages, usb sticks floppy disks, compact discs and e-mail attachments.

So, after just setting up my home home office server, and opting for Windows Server 2003. Yes I know I should probably have played with something like Ubuntu Server - but I had a licensed version of Server2003 and as I'm specifically interested in playing with Microsoft BizTalk it kind of made sense.

Even tho server is fairly robust and I wont be surfing much I always like the peace of mind of running an antivirus application on any system thats windows based or has gaping great big flag waving 'hack me please' applications like Internet Exploder on them. My personal favourite is AVG anti-virus but it doesnt install on Windows Server 2003. Aaaargh!!!!!

However, help was at hand because I found a great free opensource version called Clamwin. ClamWin is an open source product and so is completely free. It has no active scan. Combine it with Winpooch Watchdog which adds an active antivirus scan using ClamWin's internal virus definitions and you can have a decent anti-virus running on your server.

From the CLAMWIN website: