I have a machine at home that I treat as a “server”. It does all of my torrent downloads, hosts all of my remote desktop sessions, it checks my devry email and forwards it to gmail, as well as converting anything I download to iPhone format. My intention was to make this machine a bit less useful to others in the house. The machine used to be our main computer so it has all of the years of photos on it along with anything else we deemed important. It hosts both of our dropbox accounts, our carbonite backup source and just about anything else we thought we needed.

It was a bit bloated.

So I installed XP SP3 on a 1TB drive. The drive has some data on it already and the old 250Gig Drive I just unhooked.

I had considered installing Windows Server 2008 R2, but decided against it after thinking hard about my plans for the machine.

So what process do I follow for installation?

  1. Windows Update – get that going first. Install everything except IE 8.
  2. Microsoft Security Essentials – virus and malware protection
  3. Firefox
  4. FileZilla
  5. uTorrent
  6. DropBox from dropbox.com
  7. Office 2007 – I use this machine to check my DeVry email and forward to gmail ;)

So other than the initial crash when using windows update everything is working great. Super fast and just what I need to have my other machine up. I even used it to check a video setting for work today – watching video over RDP should not work well and it didn’t ;)

I will try and update this with everything else I add on. I think my next post will by my Firefox add-ons.

*I bet you thought this post meant I was going from Windows 7 back to XP. Sorry to disapoint.

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