I've decided to upgrade my HP EX470 home server. (The EX470 being the same as the EX475 other than the fact it only came with a single hard drive rather than two.) I'm not how ever going to upgrade it with more storage, I don't need that yet, rather that I am going to upgrade the CPU and the Memory.

Officially you are not able to upgrade anything other than the hard drives, but Home Server Hacks has some lovely details on how to upgrade the CPU and how to upgrade the Memory (just got to remember to update the virtual memory afterwards).

So they recommend to buy the AMD LE-1640 CPU. All find and great when you have great resources in the USA such as www.newegg.com. I however not only have to have this in Europe, but in Ireland or from a company that delivers to Ireland. Not easy and not great. There are a few companies out there, but some of the biggest are www.DABS.ie and www.Komplett.ie. There are of course a few others, but none had stock of the LE-1640. In fact neither did those two companies have the CPU in stock either.

After a big hassle I've finally been able to order LE-1640 CPU and the memory I need to make the upgrade. I'll post my results here. Should be fine, and lets see if there is much of a performance increase, not that you really need much anyway, but it's fairly cheap upgrades and it looks like that LE-1640 cpu won't be around forever.

At home I like to work on some C# code and the more proficient I get the more likely I am going to need some source control software to manage my updates and changes. As my programs get larger and more complex so does the risk of messing everything up, so I decided that I should set up a source control system.

As I have the entire .Net suite on hand I was thinking originally about Visual Source Safe or Visual Studio Team Server. Visual Source safe works, but is flaky and some come with it's own issues, so I was looking for something more modern. Visual Studio Team Server is great, but also requires a dedicated machine. I really didn't want to try and see what happened when installed on my Windows Home Server (WHS) box.

Jeff Atwood had a post on Setting up Subversion on Windows and while I love the whole open source stuff, subversion is just a little messy for my liking. It doesn't integrate directly with Visual Studio 2008 (as it requires another third party tool) and it's only in it's first version running as a Windows service.

So I decided the checkout Perforce. The great thing about Perforce is that even though it's rather expensive, they offer a two user edition free of charge which is great, just what I'm looking for and Perforce comes with a Visual Studio 2008 source control add-in.

Installing Perforce on Windows Home Server

First of all you need to download the two components, server and client. You can get these from the Perforce Windows download 32bit site. You're looking for the "Perforce Server Windows Installer" (this is what we put on the WHS) and also "P4V Installer" which is what we will put on our client machine. (I recommend you download these to your home server).

Now connect to your WHS machine using the Windows Home Server Console tool and add a new share called Perforce. Now change the user access rights so all users on your home server can not access the share. We don't want users to connect directly to this share, but we want WHS to manage to expansion of share when we outgrow your available space.

Now close down your WHS Console and log in using the Remote Desktop Connection tool to your home server.

Once you are connected open up the directory to where you downloaded perforce.exe. (In my case I downloaded this to \\homeserver\Software\Tools_Utils\Perforce\ and this is in turn available on your WHS in D:\shares\Software\Tools_Utils\Perforce)

Run perforce.exe to start the installation. The first dialog is for the locations of the software. I recommend leaving these as default as you want the application run from your system drive.

The next screen on the install configures your port number (I've left the default port) and then there is the option to specify the root directory. This is where you point Perforce to the directory you created when connected to the Windows Home Server Console. My share was called Perforce and is \\homeserver\Perforce\ while in setup you need to point it to d:\shares\perforce\. See the screen shot below. Check your d:\shares folder to get the right name, depending on what you already have there it could be named something else.

After you click next you are presented the client configuration, here you can just click next again. Then click Start to install Perforce.

That's it! Perforce is up and running on your WHS machine! Nice and easy and takes a whole 5 minutes to install.

Running Perforce Client

Now that you have Perforce installed on your WHS you will need to create an account. Install p4vinst.exe on your client machine and then once installed run the tool P4V.

Connect to: server: should be changed to your server name, in my case homeserver and the port number should match what you specified during the Perforce install.

In Connect as: click New... and then provide a username, email address and your full name.

Un the Open workspace: section click New...

You are asked for a workspace name. I would give the name of your machine.

Now create a folder where you want to keep a local copy of your files. I've put mine in C:\p4clients\steve-vaio-sz\. In the New Workspace dialog set the root to the same folder you just created.

Click Save.

Click OK and you're done.

Nice and easy.

Ok, so after a while I was thinking that buying another music device was pointless. Pointless because I realized I already had something that would work...

Shortly after I bought my iPod I picked up an Apple AirPort Express so I could stream my iTunes music from my PC to my stereo. This was great, but my recent hatefulness towards iTunes and my new found love for Windows Home Server had made the AirPort Express product useless.

Not only that, but my 3Com modem router died a good while back and I was using the AirPort Express as my wireless network up connected to my original static modem for my Internet connection. This was all great until I wanted to access my Windows Home Server from outside my network and the static modem and the apple hub could just not get a long together. So 11 routers later I finally settled on a Belkin one. All great, except my HTC TyTN II mobile phone could not connect to the router with it's wifi connection, so I was still stuck using the AirPort Express to allow my phone on the Internet. This worked fine, but a month ago I signed up to the 02 Mobile Broadband 1gb add on. Fantastic stuff, even allows me to pickup my mail while my phone is "off" unlike with the WiFi connection.

So since I've not need to use the AirPort Express to route my mobile to my router anymore I can use it for it's original task. Streaming music. This for me isn't a perfect solution now. To original devices I was thinking of getting (the Roku SoundBridge) would have been great as it would have streamed all my wma music straight from my Home Server without having to have my laptop running. This solution now requires me to have my laptop on to listen to the music. Not only that I have to stream from iTunes too. This isn't too much of a problem because I did buy an adaptor for my car and had to convert my music anyway for that. I also tried out AirFoil and oAEP, but neither worked. AirFoil can't stream audio from Windows Media Player and oAEP requires a Wave Out Mix in the sound mixer which my laptop doesn't have in Vista.

Either way I can now listen to some music in the Kitchen while I make dinner. Isn't technology a bitch.

I love my home server. I think it's one of the best products to come out in a long time. Microsoft bringing out great software and the hardware vendors with their great equipment. I would be one of the first in line to say I'm not a fan of HP stuff, but this home server is sweet, real sweet. More for another post I guess.

My main use for my home server is to host all my music. I have a load of CD's and they are currently in my 301CD Jukebox, but to remember which CD and track is in each place is a nightmare. So I decided to rip all my albums and stream them to my 360 through my home server. It works and works really well (other than the fact the 360 can be noisy).

Why don't I use my computer to stream? Well I only have laptops and don't always want to keep them on when listening to music...

So where are the woes? Well, the setup with the home server and the 360 and also streaming from the home server to my laptop is so good I want something similar in the kitchen. I make all the food in the house and spend a good time in there. I want to listen to my music there too. Now my kitchen hifi is probably even better than my 7.1 setup for music, mainly because of better speakers. (Monitor Audio Bronze 2's). But how do I listen to my music on my stereo? This is something that I've been looking into for the past couple weeks.

So I've been looking for network music devices that play pretty with Windows Connect, the media streaming component of the home server and while there are some really nice devices out here they are all too expensive for a kitchen. So I've been looking around and found the Roku SoundBridge M1001. This is for sure a few years old, but still appears to be one of the best on the market. At €115 it appears to be an ok price. Not cheep, but not at all as expensive as some others. Let me mull it over a few days, but I recon it's a buy.

I love music. I buy loads of music, though not so much recently. A few years back I bought an iPod and and a car stereo with an iPod adaptor so I could control the iPod within the car without having to use the iPod to change tracks. It was a sweet setup and my wife still uses it as I've changed cars.

Before I got my "new" car I fell out of love with the iTunes store. Sure it offers great music at low prices, but at what price? You don't get CD quality music, and if you hook that music up to a great set of headphones or to a high spec sound system you really notice the quality drop. So I stopped buying new music and just listened to what I had.

When I got my car in November 2006 it had no iPod adaptor and since then I had been burning music to disc, then that got to be too much effort so just selected about 20 albums to listen to in the car. A year and a bit later I am finally going mad listening to the same stuff over and over again.

So I bought a USA Spec iPod Adaptor (Model PA11-VOL) for the Volvo. After a careful and difficult install; mainly due to not having the correct tools and being too eager to get it installed, I now have an iPod adaptor for the car. The original reason I bought this though wasn't to use my iPod, but to use the aux in for my Windows Mobile HTC TyTN II phone. I bought all the adaptors and everything, but the hassle involved and the lack of steering wheel controls for the phone I've gone back to the iPod .

Another benefit this has brought is that I can now listen to podcasts from Giant Bomb! Great stuff.

It's been a while since I’ve been back here and to see my last post was talking about trackball mice I can see why I stopped. I was writing about rubbish. I think the problem with keeping a blog is to work out what exactly to write about. I guess I should just keep it to things I do and like. Writing about what's on my mind doesn't really work.

I've also been thinking about setting up my own custom blog on www.stevegonline.com, but so far it's only an idea. I had a look at setting up wordpress blogging software and to be fair to it, it is pretty good. Unfortunately my knowledge of CSS is very limited at the moment and to customize the theme was going to take more time that I would have liked.

On a similar but other note I am studying for my MCP exams again. After putting it on the back burner for some time now it's been hard to get back up to speed, but another week should get me where I am comfortable again.