Clapboard - Full Frontal Nerdity

With the decommissioning of my old computer, I really took notice for the first time of a strange limitation in WHS - there's no way to export an image of one of your computer's backups to a compressed folder.

I'm officially retiring Tombstone, as you already know, and I'll want to remove it from the "Computers & Backup" tab in the not-too-distant future because I'm a neat freak and because I hate having yellow things in my Home Network Status screen, even if I can check "ignore this issue" to get my thing back to green.

So, with some google-fu and a lot of time, I managed to mount, export and compress Tombstone's final backup, which now sits on my desktop as a 275GB .wim file.  That seems a little small, but it'll have to do until I can take a few days and try to restore it.  I'm sure I'll learn something interesting during that process, but at the moment, I feel as if the peace of mind I've gained by having the data there is good enough.  Even if it's not restorable, I'm sure I can mount the image as a drive to get at anything I may need.

Anyway, this post isn't a how-to, just a note on the fact that it's do-able, and probably worth it.

I'm looking into leaving Time Warner for our Cable internet, and decided to check on my speeds over at speedtest.net.  Turns out not to have sucked too much, really.  Faster than 72% of the US using "Road Runner Turbo" is okay.  I'd like to be in the 90th percentile, though.

It's January 2012, and that seems like a really good time to upgrade my workstation.

It's been a long time since I've done a real overhaul on my computer system.  Although I did replace my video cards about 6 months ago, the rest of the system has been plugging along for a year and a half or more.  Because of some end-of-the-year corporate spending requirements, I found myself looking at computer components on the 29th of December, and a few days later some boxes showed up at my door.  Go figure.

Anyway, what follows is a list of hardware because last time I wrote a post like this it was supremely helpful in terms of remembering what was in the box that sits next to me all day long when I needed to download drivers, troubleshoot problems or generally do something useful.   Sometimes posts like this are purely for me, and for that, I apologize. Tombstone, my old system, is still mostly running, although in a semi-gutted state, waiting to be re-purposed as something awesome, either a system in Andrew's growing empire or the hub of my still-theoretical porn empire. Dunno which yet. Maybe something yet different from that.

Anyway, after the break you'll find the components, names and some reasoning behind each piece of the puzzle.