Evaluating Costs

As we’ve already bought the hardware and they came with licenses for Windows there wouldn’t be any direct saving in the costs of the operating system if we switched to another one (Linux for example). Even on new machines, the cost difference between a machine supplied with Windows and without is about £70 (assuming you can find a vendor who sells machines without it) which equates to about £1 a month over the typical three-year life of hardware. Not exactly massive.

We could potentially (perhaps unadvisedly) save the cost of our anti-virus software. Longer term there are potential cost savings in being able to continue using the existing hardware when Microsoft stops supporting XP in 2013, certainly the existing machines will not support even Windows 7.

Against it I had to weigh the cost of the extra time it would undoubtedly take to support users on a new OS.

Familiarity

Something that fell against any open source software was the fact that most computer users have used Windows and Microsoft’s various other products, notably the Office suite. Although the branches don’t use Office (with the exception of a few copies of Outlook) they do use viewers and, in some cases, OpenOffice.org (or derivatives) to open MS documents.

I’ve definitely found OpenOffice.org (or derivatives) harder to work with and in some cases slower to use (partly due to familiarity, partly because the product is just slow).

Again, any questions would be coming my way, so that would mean more time spent supporting users.

Talking of support, there’s not just the issue of users, but also the administrators having to maintain an unfamiliar system. That has potential security, performance and time implications.

Hardware Support

It’s much less of an issue than it has been, but alternative operating systems mean you have to be aware of hardware support issues. There are still problems with certain hardware not being compatible, much more so for any legacy hardware.

That may mean you have to throw out or spend time making existing hardware compatible, which may actually end up costing you money. You will also have to be careful in the hardware you purchase going forward.

Interoperability

As I mentioned, in our case, we would probably end up with some machines still running the Microsoft platform, which opens you up to problems when supporting hardware, software and exchanging things between the systems.

You may suddenly find you can’t reuse systems or components as they’re not compatible, you end up supporting, administering and maintaining two separate platforms and doing something simple like sending a file to a colleague may become much more of a challenge (the newer MS formats still aren’t well supported by anything non-Microsoft and even if a package states it does support a certain file type I’ve found advanced features often don’t work).

Even if we could control this internally, we’re still working with other businesses who will continue to send us files and information in formats we may not be able to open correctly, or at all. It doesn’t make you look very professional.

Exchange

Microsoft get a lot of stick for their various products, but I haven’t come across an open source alternative to beat Outlook and Exchange. It has a good range of compatibility with devices, a web version, and its very common meeting invites work inside and outside the organization. No real bad points. It’s not a deal breaker necessarily, but it’s very handy.

Compatibility with Windows

This is similar to hardware support, but we use some software and even websites which only work on Windows (ActiveX controls, for example), services which we have little or no control over and which we have to use. That’s before you consider some of our server-side software. So we would need to maintain some sort of access to Windows regardless of what we decided to move to. That takes you back to the whole duplication argument.

In fact, stepping away from Windows means you say goodbye to a whole lot of software and while you may be able to find open source/compatible replacements for some, maybe even most, Windows offers a far greater array and (generally) guaranteed compatibility.

Multimedia support

Another area some open source systems seem to suffer from issues with multimedia support, partly down to licensing of codecs and such, which a paid operating system can afford to include. Again, probably not a deal breaker, but another mark against them.

On the Plus Side

Well, there are potential cost savings on software going forward. OS, Office and other software licenses aren’t cheap. Once XP disappears we’re probably looking at having to replace all of our hardware at the same time, with the sort of outlay no business wants to hit their cashflow.

Likewise costs for Office, anti-virus and various other pieces of software are ongoing so not having to pay for them would mean more capital saved that could be ploughed into training for users and administrators.

The Future

As I mentioned, XP becomes unsupported (as it stands) in 2013. At that point we’d be forced to look at a different OS anyway. To make use of our existing hardware we could switch to a lighter, open source OS, which we could strip down and either run that or use it as a thin client and visualize the desktops if we wish. We haven’t made any decisions on that yet, but we may have to start testing in 2012 to see how each option holds up.

Longer term I wonder if open source desktop software will largely be needed, or most desktop software for that matter, with companies buying hosted services instead, with the exception of a few applications that deal with data that is too large to handle over an internet connection.

Conclusion

Having looked at it, I eventually decided that the costs savings, especially in our hybrid environment, we’re not going to be enough to justify the move, let alone the cost of supporting and administering a new system. Most of our costs are already paid, with the investment made. Going forward it’s issues with user acceptance and interoperability that concern me the most, likewise the possibility of having to support two OS environments.

Those concerns only really multiply with larger businesses. If the quality of some of the open source tools and their interoperability improves then they may become viable. For basic tasks they’re currently okay, but getting users pulling data into Excel from a data warehouse running on SQL Server is currently a lot easier using Microsoft or other closed tools than any open source equivalent I’ve seen. And that’s just an example. Until open source can replicate every function currently provided by existing software and platforms, they’re never going to break through.

Anyway, it’s done now and you can find the site at consumeandreview.co.uk

I started by grabbing the latest version of WordPress and setting it up on my local development server. Once that was done I re-used much of my code from the book review custom post type I had created, but decided to convert it to a plugin instead (for future portability). I also added taxonomies for author and genre using the register taxonomy function. Previously I had stored author as custom meta data, but as it was something that could be shared by multiple books I figured it was better as a taxonomy and would save me re-typing (plus it allowed some functionality, such as author pages, much more easily). I also decided to change from the simple recommended yes/no system and go with a rating out of five, so that required a small change as well.

Once that was done I exported all my reviews from my old site and imported them using the WordPress Importer plugin.

I started converting the authors in the meta data to terms in the taxonomy manually at first, figuring I would leave most where they were, but then decided to move them all, so grabbed a copy of the Custom Field Taxonomies plugin. In order to get my custom post type (book_review) to be picked up so it would find author as metadata to be converted I had to modify line 124 of the admin.php file to:

foreach ( get_object_taxonomies( array('post','book_review'), 'objects' ) as $tax_name => $tax_obj )

Once that was done I went looking for a theme. I had intended to use someone else’s design to save time, but I couldn’t find any I was happy with, so I designed my own. While working on this I knew I wanted it to be image light but to make use of some bold fonts and sizes. I’m used to working with the limited pallet of web-safe fonts you can use (those installed on all/most computers regardless of type), but they didn’t seem to cut it for this project, so I researched techniques for using any font you wished on a web page that would work for all visitors.

I already knew of popular ones like sIFR and cufon, but I was happy to see that support for the CSS3 @font-face designation was now supported by the latest version of all the main browsers, so I set about learning how to embed fonts for the browsers (slightly different in IE versus everyone else, which is par for the course) and finding some suitable fonts. Google is your friend on this and I was amazed how many great free fonts are out there to improve the look of your site, I can recommend having a look on Font Squirrel, both for fonts and how to use. (update: you can also check out Google web fonts, which I only found after I built it.)

A couple of the fonts I liked didn’t have bold versions or italics, so I had to try quite a few (it ate a lot of time, but was well worth it). I plumped for ChunkFive (site header), Crimson (page text) and Fontin (headers) in the end.

It took a while to get the layout right on all the page templates. It’s not entirely there yet (I think the archives for genre should be on one page — I hate having to click through lots of pages) but I have been tweaking since the weekend and there have been small improvements (to both layout and navigation).

Something I knew I wanted was a review archive listing the books by author which isn’t something WordPress does out of the box and my previous custom code was written to support details in meta data. In the end I wrote a fairly simple database query to pull out all the details I wanted:

function vf_get_reviews_by_author() {
	global $wpdb;

	$sql = "select ter.term_id, ter.name, tertax.taxonomy, posts.ID, posts.post_title, posts.post_content
		from $wpdb->terms AS ter
		left join $wpdb->term_taxonomy tertax
		on tertax.term_id = ter.term_id
		left join $wpdb->term_relationships terrel
		on terrel.term_taxonomy_id = tertax.term_taxonomy_id
		left join $wpdb->posts posts
		on posts.ID = terrel.object_id
		where tertax.taxonomy = 'author'
		and posts.post_status = 'publish'
		order by ter.name,posts.post_title";

	$books_by_author = $wpdb->get_results($sql, ARRAY_A);

	return $books_by_author;
}

I then just loop through the results and create a new header when the author name changes. I may try to make this sortable in some way in the future. As the list was fairly long (and only likely to get longer) while leaving a lot of white space to the right, I decided to put them into columns.

To get the columns on the review archive I wrote a second query to get an author count and just keep track of the number of iterations through the loop, then insert the closing tag of the left column and open the right one when the number of loops matches half the total number of authors.

At this point I decided to add in a series taxonomy so, where books were part of a series, you could find related books easily. This was to allow people to find similar books to read and to allow them to see what else is in the same story arc/feature the same character(s). Presenting this data necessitated a slight change to the layout. I also decided the series archive should show all of the books in the series on one page, rather then five at a time (which is what I had set the default to). Easy enough to do with a custom taxonomy template and a modification of the posts_per_page in the query. I also ended up modifying the review archive to add in the series details.

After updating some books with authors, genre and series it became hard to see which ones I had updated and which ones I hadn’t in the admin section, so I added functions to call the manage_[post -type]_posts_custom_column and manage_edit-[post -type]_columns (using book_review for the post type) filters to display some additional columns for book reviews.

I added an about page and a contact form, should anyone want to get in touch (I disabled comments and trackbacks, I didn’t think they were necessary) and I could have used one of my own contact forms, but decided to use the Contact Form 7 plugin instead.

Once I was happy I registered the domain (I had a few ideas for names) and set up hosting, then loaded the themes, plugins and content. A bit of testing and tweaking (and changes, some of which are listed above) and it was ready to go. I was pleased to see that the main browsers now render in such a similar way I didn’t need any tweaks to get it working in IE (as is usual) and the use of embedded fonts means the site looks practically identical on all platforms, which is a nice bonus.

Once it was live I added a sitemap plugin (Google XML Sitemaps) to help SEO, but I had to add the Guar Sitemap sub-plugin to get custom post types included. I also setup the YOURLS plugin, which I use on a few of my sites to to automatically post to my Twitter account with a shortened link. Version 1.4.9 didn’t work with the version of YOURLS I use (1.4), so I had to roll back to 1.4.8, which did.

So far I’m pleased with the result, no doubt that’ll change, but the process gave me a chance to try some new things. I’d like to add in some functionality to offer readers links to similar books, but I’m not sure of the best way yet (I haven’t found a service that offers an easy way to get recommendations for similar items, LibraryThing looks to have promise, but you end up with a lot of fairly vague links, the page for Abhorsen, for example, lists Harry Potter and Eragon as similar, which I wouldn’t class them as). I’m happy for now, though, and it’ll give me a chance to get some reviews on some recently finished books up.

(If you’re interested in reading another post about site building, why not check out this post I wrote regarding List Books.)

Most business have internet access for a variety of reasons these days, but going forward more companies are offering you Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud computing. The benefits are obvious: you don’t need to invest in hardware or the expertise to run it, you just pay a monthly or yearly fee for however many users you have, it means any size company can afford the latest and best technology to help their business. The problem is it relies on your being able to access the services whenever you need them. And there’s the rub.

The most cost-effective internet connection is ADSL, even for bigger businesses you can get multiple lines bonded together to give you more speed. The problem is that ADSL isn’t really fit for business use. Sure, you can get business packages, you might even get service level agreements (SLAs), but at the end of the day they all fall back to BT (or Openreach, technically, who are the Railtrack of communications, they own and operate all the lines). And the problem is that while BT have guarantees in place to fix a voice line in hours, an ADSL service/line can be out for up to two days. Imagine that impact on your business when none of your staff can get to any of your hosted services, which could be everything from email to phones to documents and beyond.

The benefit of the cloud is that you can access from anywhere, so you could argue that in the event of an outage, your staff could work from home, but there’s no guarantee their home connections won’t be affected (a recent outage took out most of South Wales, hundreds of area codes were affected, so unless your staff happen to live out of the area then they probably won’t use it either). That outage was actually caused by a problem in Birmingham, so it’s not just local issues with the lines that can cause problems.

Then you have the issue of contention. Most broadband providers have contention rates of around 20:1, which means 20 customers share one line. Contention means fighting for bandwidth with everyone else. As you can imagine, the more people online (and during the day in a business-heavy area, that means everyone) the slower you go. I’ve seen download speeds on an 8Mb line drop to 0.5Mb. You can get business packages which go as low as 1:1 contention, which should eliminate this, but availability may be an issue.

There are obviously alternatives to ADSL:

• SDSL – limited to 1MB or 2MB download (and upload, it’s synchronous), not offered at all exchanges and is based on your distance from the exchange. Again, it largely uses the broadband network, so if an outage occurs you’re still affected. Contention tends to be lower (10:1) and 1:1 packages are available. At least four to six times the price of ADSL.
• Leased Line – the ultimate connection, your own dedicated line, but it’s very expensive compared to any of the other options and the faster you need, the more expensive it is. Installation with be a few thousand and it’ll cost £8-10k a year to run, probably on a three-year contract. Zero contention, it’s for your use only.
• Fibre – if you’re very lucky you might be in a BT or Virgin fibre area, but most businesses aren’t. So while it would be a good alternative, with faster speeds and better contention, for most people it simply won’t be an option.
• Satellite – supposedly has very good coverage and package prices aren’t too bad, but it usually only works one way, the upload is actually done by broadband in most cases, which kind of defeats the purpose. A two-way connection is very expensive.
• 3G – once the physical lines are out of the way you’re left with ‘mobile broadband’ using 3G. Not the fastest, coverage and speeds will vary greatly, even if they say you’re in an area with good coverage, and prices can be expensive or offer limited bandwidth. Probably OK as a backup solution or for mobile users, but not what you want for a fixed site.

Regardless of your choice, you’ll find most offerings fall back onto the BT network at some point, with the exception of fibre (which generally rules itself out due to lack of availability) or 3G (which rules itself out based on speed, cost and reliability), which leaves you open to outages up the chain even if they local lines work OK.

So, while the world seems intent on moving to the cloud, unless you have the pockets for leased line you really are in the hands of the providers and, frankly, they’re not good enough to gamble your business on. Why BT can guarantee a couple of hours to fix a voice line but broadband, running over the same line, can take up to two days to fix, is beyond me. Surely the phone system is largely the same now, all controlled by computer equipment, not physical switches, so what’s the difference?

At the current time, in the UK at least, the options available are not fit for purpose and most businesses will encounter common outages of their internet connection unless prepared to pay vast sums to buy premium services. As we become ever more reliant on our internet connections this problem is only set to grow and while BT are rolling out fibre, it’s too slow and still doesn’t guarantee reliability if the service fails, rather than the line. It’s limiting services like VOIP and video calling, which offer massive cost savings to small and medium sized enterprises. We really do need to get a 21st Century network up and running to stay competitive in the future.

I spent a lot of time researching cases, motherboards and CPUs.  The mini-ITX segment is growing, but still fairly small.  I was trying to balance four things: power consumption, noise, size and performance.

They’re not easy things to match and there were some trade-offs. 

The Decisions

I saw and pretty much set my heart on the Antec ISK 300-65 case from the start.  It was tiny, looked good, was pretty cheap and included a fanless 65W power supply.  Unlike most other cases its size, it provided space for two 2.5” HDDs and a slimline optical drive.  I wanted two drives to match my old system; an SSD for boot and a regular disk for storage.  I wanted to avoid a regular-size ATX PSU as they don’t make them below 300W and even the 80Plus units aren’t efficient below 20% of their power draw (just why does no one make a 150-200W one?).  So 65W was my goal power usage (ideally I wanted 30W idle).

I really wanted an i3 system.  The i3 530 has onboard graphics and I saw plenty of articles with it idling around 30W, but it could jump up real fast (with a TDP of 73W).  It seemed to offer a great balance of power and performance.  I almost committed to it, but found that none of the boards offered 2560×1600 output via any of their ports.  The chipset can do it, but not one the motherboard manufacturers offered it.

This was a problem as I wanted to hook this thing up to a 30” monitor at some point.  It would mean an additional graphics card, which basically guaranteed me being over the 65W.  So I turned to AMD.

I already have a 5050e in my HTPC and know how little power they use and heat they produce while still offering a good level of performance (remember, I found a dual-core Atom almost did everything I needed for day-to-day running).  So I knew one of the newer X2 chips would do it (I could have plumped for a three- or four-core chip, but extra cores only really count when doing things that need/use them — usually transcoding video — higher clock speed is better for general use and the X2 offered better speeds).  None of the AMD chips competed with the i3 on performance for the money (or performance per watt).

Finding a motherboard was a problem though.  There just aren’t that many mini-ITX boards around and of those, only two or three are AMD.  They were all way more than the Intel ones, which negated the benefit of the cheap CPUs.  In the end I found the Asus M4A88T-I, which was relatively new, but seemed to offer what I wanted it.  I had to settle for SODIMM RAM (usually used in laptops) and I didn’t get dual screen graphics, but I did get a 2560×1600 output from the onboard ATI HD 4250.

I also knew the stock CPU coolers were OK on AMD (having used one on a build for my brother), whereas the Intel ones for the i3 came in for a lot of stick in the articles I read and I couldn’t find a good low-profile replacement.

The Hardware

What I ended up with (all sourced from eBuyer) was:

• Case: Antec ISK 300-65 – £58.59
• Mobo: Asus M4A88T-I 880G – £104.99
• CPU: AMD Athlon II X2 240e 2.8GHz – £55.23
• RAM: Extra Value 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 1066MHz/PC3-8500 SODIMM – £65.32
• HDD: 500GB WD Scorpio Blue 2.5” 5400RPM – £45.10
• Optical drive: Samsung SN-S083 Slimline DVD±RW – £21.99
• Total: £351.22

Additional hardware (I already had):

• 128GB Corsair SSD from previous machine.
• Zalman Fanmate 2 fan controller
• Scythe 80mm fan (taken from a Scythe Mini Ninja which I had left over as I run it passively)
• Also purchased: Startech Slimline SATA adapter (not required, the built-in PSU had a mini-SATA connection)

The Build

Putting it together was a bit fiddly (mainly due to the size of the case) but generally went OK.  The main issue was that the PSU ATX cable was as far away from the ATX socket on the mobo as it was possible to get.

The PSU DC card is held in the case by four screws, so I tried turning it around, this sort of worked but it meant the cables ran over the side of the case, making it impossible to put the lid on.

I did manage to get the cable in by plugging in both ends with the PSU board loose, then wrestling it into position and bolting it down.  This leaves the ATX cable taught across the top of the CPU cooler though.  Not ideal.

I didn’t originally put the Fanmate in and added that after some trial and error with the noise of the fans.  I abandoned the BIOS controlled speed setting and used the manual speed controller instead for the chassis fan.  This worked better for noise.

Installing Windows 7 64-bit was a bit more fun though.  I changed a few settings in the BIOS before hand and it wouldn’t get past the ‘Starting Windows’ page after the loading files screen.  I searched online and thought it was maybe that I had the drives set to AHCI instead of IDE, but no joy.  In the end, resetting the BIOS back to its default settings solved it and I could install it.

Build Photos

Some photos from putting it all together. Click on them to see larger versions.

Usage

While I was transferring files here and there and importing music to iTunes the system seemed to grind to a halt.  This worried me.  Since then, it’s actually been fine and is running as quiet as any desktop I’ve used while never struggling like the Revo does when trying to play Flash and trailers on Apple.  The Atom is running two screens though and this is only outputting to one 22” for the time being.

Thus far then, the goal of having a reasonably performing system is OK.

Power Usage, Noise and Cooling

Two of my main aims were to build a very quiet machine that used very little power.  Largely I think I succeeded, though there may be some room for improvement.

I’m using the stock AMD cooler and a Scythe 80mm fan to replace the (reportedly) noisy stock Antec case fan.  I have a Fanmate 2 on it to dial it back to 1,000 RPM, which means the CPU cooler is running below 2,000. 

At these speeds the machine is quiet (not silent), but much better than my Acer Aspire Revo, and the CPU is reporting 39 degrees C (22 in the cores) and the mainboard shows 46.  I have tried it with the case fan disabled and running some heavy apps it got up to the mid-sixties.  Not a problem, but the RPM on the CPU cooler increased and so did the noise.  You could probably run the CPU passive with two case fans trickling along at 1,000 RPM.  I can sometimes here occasional clicks from the WD HDD.

The Asus disk supplied with the motherboard contains a utility called EPU which has three settings to control the power use and functionality.  There’s Max Power Saving Mode, High Performance Mode and Auto Mode.  They’re fairly self explanatory and the software basically throttles the CPU, GPU, HDD and fans.

By way of example, using the Auto Mode, my machine idles around 39W, when it High Performance Mode, it idles around 42W.

As standard, the BIOS is not set to regulate the fan speeds.  Turning this on makes a big difference to the noise of the system as all the fans don’t run flat out.

CPUID Hardware Monitor shows the processor only uses watts when it needs to, taking 12W most of the time and firing up to the full 45W only when necessary.  That’s matched by the readings from the power monitor I have it plugged into, which shows idle in the 40-45W bracket most of the time with spikes to 65W, sometimes slightly higher.

In S3 sleep it draws just over 2W.

Conclusion

Overall then my goals seem to have been met.  I have a small system that draws little power and is quiet (not quite as quiet as I would like maybe, but it is currently two feet from my head and much quieter than the Revo is).  All this while not sacrificing performance as a general surfing, email, writing, etc machine.

If I’m being brutal I’d admit I would like it to draw even less power (I had a figure of 30W idle in mind) though this may not be possible with the UK power supply (240V, where most power consumption reports are done in the US where they only draw 110).  I would also like the machine even quieter.  Though with my CPU not generally going above 50 degrees I think simply running the CPU cooler slower may resolve it.

Desktop PCs

My Revo cost about £190 (you can currently get them for about £180) as I bought the Linux version. There are a few other machines for that price, but they’re mainly above £200. The Linux version is fine if you either have a copy of Windows lying around (a retail copy, OEM copies are tied to the hardware, technically) or are happy to run Linux (not necessarily the one installed) and competent enough to get hold of a copy (or use the supplied one). Most people, though, will want to run Windows. Now you can buy a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium (the most popular version) for about £75 (for OEM, retail will be £83). The only problem is then you can’t install it as the Revo has no DVD drive, you’d need to buy an external one if you don’t already have one, you’re looking at £30-40. So now we’re talking about a total cost of £285 (180+75+30).

You can of course buy a Windows version of the Revo. There are three versions: one with 2GB RAM and 250GB hard drive, which costs £240; one with 2GB RAM and a 320GB hard drive, which costs £285; and one with 4GB RAM and a 500GB hard drive, which costs £299. Personally, I think the smallest model is more than enough for most people (in terms of RAM and drive space). So now we’re only looking at £240, but we still don’t have a DVD drive, so if you want to install any software, rip music or movies or do any one of the other things a DVD drive is useful for, you’ll still need to buy an external one. Assuming this is going to be the only machine in the house, most people need one I would say, so you’re looking at £270-280.

For that money you can find alternative machines out there with a lot more CPU power (and therefore longevity), expandability and are all in one box (instead of having a DVD drive trailing off it). For example, Dell currently has its base model Inspiron desktop with either an Intel Dual Core 2.7Ghz processor or an AMD dual-core Athlon II 240 X2 processor available for £299 (£279 if you opt for a Celeron or Semperon chip, both quicker than an Atom). You still get 2GB of RAM, plus a 320GB hard drive, and the larger case provides a lot more potential for future upgrades and expansion should you need it. It’s not all rosy, it doesn’t come with WIFI like the Revo. I found an Acer Veriton with 1GB RAM (I’d recommend 2GB as a minimum but it’s an easy upgrade for about £25), 160GB hard drive and Windows 7 Pro for £255.

If you’re not fussed about the OS there’s the Acer Aspire X1301 for £284 which comes with 4GB RAM, a 1TB hard drive and a dual-core Athlon 215 X2 processor. I found a 2.7Ghz Dual Core Pentium Lenovo with only 1GB RAM and a 250GB hard drive. eBuyer even have some ‘Extra Value’ machines with no OS that start at £228 for a 2.9Ghz Dual Core Pentium with 2GB RAM and a 500GB hard drive.

Now these are big box machines, the Revo is small (though not especially quiet I found) and probably don’t use great quality parts, but I’d still bet they’ll out last the Revo. If you want something smaller, there’s a smaller Inspiron model from Dell for £50 more. The Advent Firefly with a 2.6Ghz processor Pentium Dual Core comes in at £320 and looks nice and small. There all likely to draw more power than the Revo, though most manufacturers are being very hot on this at the moment so I wouldn’t expect them to draw a huge amount and most people don’t leave them on all day so the extra cost will be negligible.

Laptop PCs

It’s a similar situation with laptops as well.  Using PC World as a pricing example, you can grab a netbook, which is typically powered by an atom processor, for £199.  For that you get an eMachines device with a single-core processor, 1GB of RAM and 160GB hard drive.  It also has four hours of battery life and weighs just 1.1Kg.  You only get a 10.1” screen though and no optical drive, and it comes with Windows XP.  There’s plenty more in the £240-£300 bracket.  They don’t even stock a dual-core netbook.

Ignoring the refurbished laptops, they start at £300 for a EI Systems Sorrento, which has a 2.2 Ghz Celeron 900 processor and 2GB of RAM with a 15.6” screen.  It weighs 2.4 Kg though and there’s no mention of batter life.  It does come with Windows 7 though.  The Celerons are the lower end of Intel’s processor range but are still much faster than any Atom (about twice looking at some benchmarks).

Not a brand I’ve heard of, so come up a bit further (£380) and you can get a Compaq Presario with an AMD Athlon II M320 processor which clocks in about four times faster.  Comes with 2GB of RAM, a 320GB hard drive and a 15.6” screen.  Again, you sacrifice weight and no mention on battery life.  It comes with Windows 7.

It looks like £400 is where you start getting the full dual-core processors, generally with 2-3 GB of RAM and 250-320GB hard drives.  These are the more popular 15.6” size, smaller ones come in a bit more (13.3” Toshiba for £420).

Shop around though and you can get that Presario with the AMD Athlon for £360.

OK, so these machines are nearly twice as expensive, but computers are not just about the initial cost.  The benefits of the other machines are that they come with an optical drive, making it easier to install software, bigger screens which make them easier to use and, more importantly, they’ll be capable of running software happily for several years, which the Atom-powered netbooks won’t.  And that’s before you consider they usually allow for upgrades to memory and hard drives that could keep them going even longer.

Conclusion

My original question was whether an Atom-powered PC is worth buying for the average user. The answer is no, it’s not. For less and certainly not much more money there are a range of machines that offer vastly more processing power and future proofing than any computer that runs the Atom platform. Personally, I think it makes the Atom machines a false economy.

My advice would be to buy a more powerful machine rather than splash out on a netbook or nettop (as they’re called). As a second machine an Atom-powered device may be suitable, for fairly light activities, but not as a general computer for most users. In that respect they have their uses, but a smartphone or a tablet would provide most of the functionality.  A second-hand machine would be better in most cases. Don’t be fooled by the hype.

You, your company, your club, whatever, could have a great website that’s easy to maintain in no time, read on to find out how.

What You’ll Need

To host your own website you need four things:

1. A domain name (i.e. www.yourwebsite.com)
2. A web host to host your website (store the files and make them available for people to see)
3. Static HTML files or a Content Management System to display your content
4. Some content

This article will run through setting up the first three, the last one is up to you.

Step 1 – Register a domain

The first thing you’ll need is a domain name.  This allows people to find your website.  To register a domain you need to buy one from a domain registrar.  Some web hosts will offer them as part of hosting packages, but I recommend setting one up on your own to give you more control (some web hosts don’t let you take them with you).

Personally, I’d recommend 123-Reg for any UK domains (e.g .co.uk) and Go Daddy for generic/US domains (e.g .com) as they offer good prices and flexibility in how you handle your domain name.  There are plenty of others out there.

On the registrar’s site you’ll be able to search for a domain name and it will tell you if it’s available (and typically what other variations are too).  You may find your preferred domain name is taken, if so you may need to get creative.  Some sites will offer suggestions for alternatives too.

I’d recommend only sticking to .com, .net, .org and .co.uk domains unless you have no choice (they’re the ones people are likely to try if they can’t remember which it was).

At the time of writing, a .com domain will cost you about £7.50 for a year while a .co.uk will set you back £5.98 for two years (minimum is two years).

Step 2 – Get a web host

Once you’ve registered a domain you’ll have a name, but it won’t point to anywhere, so the next is to get some hosted web space.  Again, there are a lot of companies that do this.  If you’re just hosting a basic personal site or one for your business then practically any package will suffice, you don’t need huge amounts of space or transfer allowance.

There are (broadly) two types of web hosting: Linux and Windows.  I recommend Linux as there are generally more hosts around, they’re cheaper and it supports a wider range of (free) software.  Due to the software we’re going to install in the next steps we need a Linux host and, ideally, one with Fantastico or similar automated install options.

One other consideration is whether to host in the UK or elsewhere (typically US).  I’ve hosted in both and it doesn’t really make a difference (US hosting is generally cheaper) but be aware of any data protection rules you may need to adhere to.

You can find some of my suggestions for hosting here, I’ve previously used Meir Hosting and their ‘Personal’ plan should be fine for most people (you can always upgrade at a later date).  For £1 a month (at the time of writing) you can’t really go wrong.

During the sign-up process don’t forget to indicate you already have a domain and fill in the relevant details.

Once completed you should get details of how to point your domain at their servers so your website appears when you type in the address.  This will be in the form of an IP address or domain name for their nameservers (typically two are specified).  You’ll need to login to the account with your domain registrar, go to the control panel and modify the nameserver addresses (it may be under DNS controls/settings).  Check the FAQs for your registrar if you’re not sure.  Note that it may take up to 48hrs for it to come into effect (although usually much quicker).

Step 3 – Install WordPress

The first question is probably: Why WordPress?  Well, it’s a mature platform that’s easy to use and has a big user and support base.  That means anyone should be able to pick it up quickly and if you want to add functionality there’s probably already a plugin that does it.  By example, this site runs WordPress.

You can visit the WordPress website and download the files, unpack and upload, manually create the database, update the config file and install.  The easier option is to find a host that offers single-click install of WordPress (as many hosts do, check their features).

This will differ slightly depending on the host.  One common platform is Fantastico.  Vidahost, one of the hosts I use, offers a video about installing WordPress using Fantastico that should be relevant to any host that has it.

Make sure you install it in the main directory and not a subfolder/directory.

Step 4 – Find a theme

Once you have WordPress installed it’s time to find a theme for your site.  WordPress comes with some default themes but they’re fairly lame and there are plenty of more exciting/relevant ones out there.

You have two options:

1. A free theme.
2. A paid (premium) theme.

A premium theme will cost money, typically not that much depending on the source and type.  For a non-exclusive theme (one that other people besides you could use) you’re probably looking at $20-$150.

There are plenty of free templates out there though, which are perfectly good quality for a great-looking website.  You may need to check the terms for the theme if you want to use it for a business as a few are not for commercial use.

There are plenty of places to find themes, just stick “wordpress templates” into your favourite search engine, but a few to get you started:

• The official WordPress themes directory
• WordPress Themes Base
• Top WP Themes
• Free WP Themes

You can usually search by type or colour and other options and preview the them so you can see in detail what it looks like.  Note that for a standard website you’re interested in how the pages look more than things like blog posts.

Once you’ve found one you’re happy with, download it.  You should end up with a saved zip file.

To install it, login to your copy of WordPress (typically www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin) and pick the Appearance tab, then the Add New Themes link.  Select the option to Upload and Browse to the zip file you downloaded.  WordPress will then upload the theme and present some options.  Select Activate to make the the theme live.  Click the Visit Site link at the top and you should see your website now sports the new look.

Some themes may offer you some options to customise as well, you may need to play with these to get the results you want.

Step 5 – Customise WordPress

Okay, we’re nearly there.  We have the theme installed, but we need do a few things before we can start adding content.  First, WordPress adds some default content we need to delete.

In your copy of WordPress, click Comments on the menu, hover over the single comment and select the Trash link (or tick the checkbox next to it and select Move to Trash from the Bulk Actions dropdown at the top).  Now click the link for Trash at the top and click the button to Empty Trash.

Next, click the Posts option on the menu.  Same here, hover and click Trash.  Then click the link to Trash and empty it. 

Now on to the Links menu option.  Select all of the links (use the box at the top above all the options to select them all) and pick Delete from the Bulk Actions dropdown, then hit Apply.

Right, nice and clean.

Now click the Pages link on the menu.  There should be a default page called About.  Click the page title or the Edit link to open it up.  Where it says About, delete it and put Home as this is going to be the home page.  You can change the text now or wait until later.  You also need to untick the ‘Allow Comments’ and ‘Allow trackbacks…’ options under Discussion.  Hit Update on the right to save it.

Now click the Settings link on the menu.  Under General Settings, change the blog title to the title of your website (your name, company name, etc), modify or delete the tagline, update the email address and pick your timezone.  Then hit Save Changes.

Now click the link under Settings for Reading.  Modify the ‘Front page displays’ option to select ‘A static page’ and pick Home from the dropdown list.  Hit Save Changes.

Again under Settings, pick Discussion.  Untick the boxes for ‘Atempt to notify…’, ‘Allow link notifications…’ and ‘Allow people to post comments…’ and hit Save Changes.

Lastly, also under settings, hit Permalinks.  This controls how the URLs of your pages appear.  As you’re only creating pages, just pick ‘Day and name’ and hit Save Changes.

If you use the Visit Site link at the top you should now see your domain with your theme and the home page you modified.

Step 6 – Add content

Next is to add some content.  Back into WordPress.  If you didn’t update the Home page earlier, click the Pages link in the menu and modify the Home page, the text editor is similar to Word.  You can make text bold, italic, add links, lists, etc.  Hit Update when you’re done.

To add other pages, under the Pages header in the menu select Add New.  Type in the name of the page (e.g. Contact, About) and put the content in the box below, hit Publish when you’re done.

If you visit the site again you should see your new page listed, click on the link and it should display the content you just entered.

Add more in the same way until you have your site (you can also upload images and other media).

Step 7 – Bonus features

So you’re all there, with a website built and ready to go.  The benefit of doing this on your own domain with your own domain name means there are some other benefits:

• You have your own branded email addresses (i.e. you@yourdomain.com), which look far more professional than one from your ISP or a free email service, you can also take it with you should you need to change.  You can either set this up as a mailbox where you can access mail online or download to your favourite email client (e.g. Outlook) or you set it to forward to any other email service.
• You can integrate other social media services into your website (such as Twitter and Facebook) using some of the many plugins available.
• Easily add a contact form to your site, to save advertising your email address to spammers.

Conclusion

So there you go, how to get a website up and running quickly that anyone can edit and update (so no need to keep going back and getting charged by a pro) that hopefully looks professional.  No more need to use terrible FrontPage templates or web pages created in Word.

My only concern is that there aren’t many templates for WordPress designed just to act as a website instead of blogs and even making a page your home page you end up with static content that implies blog content.  I’m thinking of knocking up some more flexible templates to get around that.

Anyway, it won’t end the number of bad sites out there, but maybe it’ll help someone.

1. Silence is Golden
   Making a PC totally silent is hard and can be expensive, but well worth it.  My top tips are to pick a good case and case fans, don’t scrimp on these.  Another rule of thumb is that if it’s got a fan it’ll never be silent (CPU coolers and PSUs) no matter what they say.  Fan controllers are a great way to help reduce noise to a minimum though.
2. It’s All About the Case
   Definitely don’t scrimp on your case, but research it well first, my Silverstone LC17 wasn’t cheap and is nice (if big), but I built an HTPC for my brother using an Antec NSK 2480, which is their budget HTPC case and it was infinitely easier to build, had nice separation of PSU and main compartment (to keep heat down) and vibration dampening mounts for the HDDs as standard (not quite as quiet as mine, but it didn’t take a fanless CPU fan, fanless PSU and some fan controllers to get it that way).

   There’s also a massive range of sizes and styles out there, so take a look around.  Silverstone, Antec, Thermaltake and Lian Li are a few quality makers but are by no means a complete list.

3. Trade Horsepower for Less Power
   HTPCs need very little processing power, playing back even HD video is not CPU intensive, just make sure you have reasonable graphics, onboard generally suffices depending on the type.  Recording TV likewise takes very little power.  Where you’ll need it is transcoding (changing the format of recorded material) or ripping DVDs.  An Atom processor on the ION platform works perfectly well to deliver content, so it doesn’t need to be a beast.

   Review your CPU choice to see if there are lower-power options available, some of the new processors require 95+w to run, mine works fine and only draws 45w, the Atoms only draw 10w.  That means less heat is being generated so you need less cooling, which means the computer can run quieter (and you can have a smaller case).

   If you plan on doing any transcoding (and some of the add-ons to strip adverts do this too) bear that in mind when picking your CPU, you can get around this by scheduling the work to be done overnight to minimise impact too.

4. Regular Servicing
   HTPCs are not for the faint-hearted, this isn’t a ‘set it and forget it’ piece of kit, it’ll need you to keep it running (installing updates, rebooting, finding drivers, etc) and it will freeze and crash occasionally, it’s not as slick as a bought solution.  The pay-off is you can do a lot more with it and the options are endless, plus you can upgrade at will, rather than being locked to the hardware.  

   I’m not sure I’d recommend one to someone who isn’t prepared for that and knows what to do when you find it non-responsive after a Windows Update or it blue screens midway through playing back a movie (i.e. the relatives, you’ll be doing endless support).

Anyway, I thought it was time to get around to writing up my experience with that build. 

This build came in for under £400, I could have shaved more off if I had used the included remote that came with the tuner (but I wanted to be able to wake the machine using it) and had bought cheaper case fans.

The Hardware

Case: Antec NSK 2480
PSU: 380w included in the case
Mobo: Asus M4A78-VM 
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 5050e
Cooler: Stock AMD supplied with CPU
RAM: 2 * Kingston 1gb DDR2 800mhz
HDD: Western Digital Caviar Green 500Gb
DVD: LG GH22NS40 SATA Black
TV Tuner: Hauppauge WinTV Nova-TD 500 (dual tuner)
Keyboard: Nexos 2.4Ghz Wireless Multimedia Keyboard with TouchPad
Remote: Generic Windows MCE IR remote look-a-like
Other: 2 * 120mm Sharkoon ‘golfball’ case fans

Comments on the Build

I preferred the 2480 case to another option (the Antec Minuet 350) and I was very impressed, it was well made and had good segregation of PSU and motherboard as well as excellent mounting (vertical, on their side) of the HDDs, which had silicon/rubber grommets on the mounts to insulate vibration.

I was worried about using the stock cooler, thinking it would be too noisy, but decided to try it and was pleasantly surprised. I went with the Hauppauge tuner as I have had good experience with them over the years, but my older model seems to be struggling in Win7, not sure who’s to blame though. I went with a wireless keyboard as I’m not massively thrilled with my IR one, this was OK but it didn’t make me change mine.

The motherboard only came with one SATA cable and due to the placement of the DVD and HDD drives I had to get a SATA power extension to reach the HDD, I bought a kit which had a molex-to-SATA power converter on it and a SATA cable in the end.

I went with the WD drive as I’ve had good experience with WD and my two 1Tb drives have been excellent, they are extremely quiet. I’d also seen some reports of reliability issues on the Samsungs, which seemed to be the main competition. A colleague of mine had two 500Gb Samsung drives fail in the same week well inside a year (replaced under warranty thankfully).

The Sharkoon fans were expensive, but they are awesome. If money’s no object and you want total silence I’d recommend them. There’s probably a better balance of noise vs cost out there though.

The Software

I went with Windows 7 RC (this was sometime last year) as it was free (for a while) and it uses Windows Media Centre.

I also installed Media Browser (why wouldn’t you?).

As with mine, I went with a black theme.

Codec support came courtesy of Shark007′s pack.

I also installed DVD Shrink and AnyDVD for ripping DVDs to the HDD.

Problems

Apart from finding the lack of SATA cables and the reach of the PSU power a bit short, generally all went smoothly.

Windows 7 was fun to install at first, initially I was using a PATA DVD drive with a SATA HDD and this seems to be a problem. Once installed I was very impressed with 7mc, less so after upgrading mine, but that might be a hardware issue. The biggest problem I had was when I hooked up a spare Belkin USB wireless-N stick my brother had to enable internet access (an N1 Wireless USB Adapter – F5D8051uk – I think). I could not get Win7 to connect to the internet (it connected to the router fine). After a lot of trial and error, plenty of head-scratching, swearing and trawling of the interwebs I found an updated driver fixed it.

Conclusion

Generally a fairly easy build, aside from a few quirks with the hardware/software interface and it was working well when I left it (although they had issues with the strength of their TV signal which caused problems, obviously).

As before I installed Astrotoy7’s black theme (I used Media Center Studio to install) and the latest beta of Mediabrowser.

As with Vista I installed the codec pack from Shark007.net (obviously picking the Win 7 version this time).

The installation wasn’t pain free, however.  After installing I found that my TV tuner kept giving me an error about no tuners being available, despite the fact that none of them were being used.  Thankfully it wasn’t affecting recorded programs (it did initially, it did improve after some tweaking).  Initially I assumed it was the Hauppauge tuner drivers and Win 7 but I tried installing the latest drivers and no joy.  In the end I tracked the answer down to a Green Button forum post (I had seen others to be fair) which suggested it wasn’t the tuner but the graphics card, the onboard ATI HD3200, more specifically the catalyst control centre it comes with.  I had the latest drivers but these don’t help, I had to downgrade to the 9.8 drivers and low-and-behold that seems to have sorted it and I now have a fully reliable HTPC back.  The new drivers also seem to have sorted some other reliability issues that meant random freezing and reboots.

Another issue I had, which seems to have sorted itself too (after the graphics upgrade, though it could have been a Windows Update fix), was connecting to the network after waking, for some reason no matter what I did it only found it as a public network rather than my home network, so wouldn’t connect to the internet.

All in all not a great changeover, normally I follow the old rule of ‘don’t install a new MS OS until the first service pack has been released.’  I thought Windows 7 was a service pack for Vista, so went ahead, probably not the wisest choice on reflection.  Maybe it doesn’t need the service pack anymore, but certainly give it couple of months to bed in.  The ordeal is over now though and everything is running smoothly again, I hope.

My Build

My HTPC consists of:

I have left out the £37 for AnyDVD as unnecessary and the prices don’t include any postage I might have paid.

That’s a fairly pricey build (cheaper than some I’ve seen, and probably cheaper/better than a bought model).

A Cheaper Alternative

So I’ve been hunting around for a cheaper set of components. Some have come down since I bought them, some have gone up, but by trawling the forums and various online PC parts stores, here’s my suggestions:

This doesn’t include any postage costs.

For that you should get a reasonably low power machine, capable of 1080p playback (you can add a Blu-ray drive should you wish) and with capacity to be upgraded later. It uses onboard sound (5.1) and graphics (HDMI).

Some alternatives were the Antec Minuet 350 case (£79.98 from Ebuyer), but it only supports half-height cards I think, which rules out the TV tuner, and it’s not as well designed as the 2480. I have left out a CPU cooler, the CPU will come with one, it’s fairly quiet from what I understand as the CPU is low power, possibly an after-market one may be needed (for example, Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 LP, £13.77 from Scan). I haven’t included OS, at the moment I would load Windows 7 release candidate on it for free (until July 2010), otherwise you’re looking at £60-90 more for Vista. Obviously any parts you can reuse help the cause.

In the future it may be the likes of a dual-core Atom with Nvidia ION will do the job, although I’m still not convinced they’re quite up to the job of acting as a full PVR (most don’t have the PCI slots for expansion and I’m not too keen on the USB tuners).