Following on from my previous post on the subject of my new server, its been running fine for a week.

Here's the thing sat next to the old server. Much smaller, and much more likely to survive the journey to Guildford - I've actually decided to use screws to hold this one together, not cellotape and blu-tac. Although I'm sure I'll be swearing at it when I need to swap out some disks.

The only real downside to using such a smaller case is the number of disks it can support. There are only two 3.5 inch bays with this particular case, and one DVD-ROM drive bay - which I play to use to put an extra disk in, as having a DVD-ROM drive would be a bit pointless. But if push came to shove Windows Home Server is quite happy using USB drives too.

Here's the exact build for those interested:

Asus T3-P5G31 barebones
Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5200
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Low Profile Fan
OcUK 4GB 677 DDR2
Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB

Other drives were harvested from the old server, but I'll probably end up adding a 1.5TB drive at some point. The new Western Digital drives are pretty quiet, but they're still farely loud while seeking. Not as quiet as my Hitachi P7K500 I use in my desktop, which are pretty much silent while doing anything, including seeking.

Temperatures aren't bad considering it only has one fan other the one in the PSU, which is on the CPU - no chipset fans (which always get worn out after a few years). The two cores float between 36° and 44°, and the two drives in there at the moment float between 39° and 43° the CPU fan happily runs at around 1400 RPM, I've only twice heard it spin up to about 2000 RPM and then only for a couple of minutes usually when the server is munching through some backups.

Today I'm putting together a new server, its based on an Asus T3 barebones system, I've got a 2.5Ghz dual core Pentium for it, and 4GB of RAM. As well as some of the new low power Western Digital disks.

This will be replacing my 9 year old system which has faithfully been running almost nonstop based on a 1.4Ghz Athlon Thunderbird, with 1.5GB of RAM and a collection of aging hard disks, this has been running Windows Home Server and a Virtual Machine running Small Business Server flawlessly, so hopefully the new system will be just as reliable.

All together it came to about £400, including Windows Home Server. On the plus side it should be using 25-50% of the energy of my existing server. Meaning it'll pay for itself in just a couple of years.

Considering how cheap hardware is nowadays this really is a fantastic time to be replacing older energy-hungry systems with new, smaller, faster and more efficent systems, something businesses should really be looking at to reduce their energy bills.

If everything goes to plan, my old server will be retired sometime tomorrow.

As well as the new XP Mode VMs. Public release still on for Tuesday.

Go get it here.

New features include OpenDocument support, integrating the XPS and PDF functionality that was previously a free add-on (removed before the original release because of Adobe's complaining). More changes here.

Microsoft have officially confirmed that the Release Candidiate of Windows 7 will be up for download starting from the 5th of May for the general public.

MSDN and Technet subscribers will get it the bits on the 30th of April. Sweet.

So Dr Starkey has found himself in a spot of bother over his remarks he made on Question Time last night. Basically when asked if he supported having a public holiday for Saint George's day:

"If we decide to go down this route of having an English national day, that means we become a feeble little country, just like the Scots and the Welsh and the Irish." and "We don't make a great fuss about Shakespeare like the Scots do about that deeply boring provincial poet Burns" and "What the Scots and Welsh are, are typical small nations with a romantic 19th Century-style nationalism".

What's the problem with that? Oh wait yeah, people don't like having their cherished petty nationalistic beliefs trodden on. WELL TOO BAD. Dr Starkey has the right to say what he thinks and let's be honest, he knows a tad more about British history than the lay-people sat in the audience booing - not only that he does have a point. Just think what we'd have to put up with if we had English nationalism on the same scale as in Wales or Scotland, it would do my head in and would probably end up destroying the union.

I don't take offence with all the points he made on QT which I disagree with, I don't demand an apology for him stating a position contrary to mine.

These people have no counter argument and so they resort to getting "upset" and demanding an apology, essentially admitting that their position is baseless.

I'm sick to death of people being "offended" and trying to curtail freedom of speech. Dr Starkey should not apologise to these people. To do so would be like apologising to the Christian mobs that burned down the Great Library in Alexandria because they found reason, logic and knowledge, offensive.