Windows 7 Home Premium upgrade in Latvia

So, Windows 7 is here. Since trying W7 beta in the beginning of 2009, I knew that this was the first OS that I’ll upgrade my home computers to and will be willing to pay for it. I will need several copies for my home:

1. gaming/multimedia PC – currently runs W7 RC. It absolutely needs a Windows license, because I use it to for playing games, and Linux just can’t compete here. Will update it to Windows 7 Home Premium (which has all I need, including Windows Media Center).

2. home server- has Ubuntu and W7 trials at the moment. I can use it in this mode for another 100 days. It is now fully configured to provide the functionality I need – filesharing, utorrent, orb, wuala, https web server, webdav and vpn. In the upcoming 3 months I will try get same functionality (except orb) under Ubuntu. If that works, fine. Otherwise, will upgrade to W7 too. Home Premium does not support Remote Desktop server, but I can manage with VNC I think.

3. 2 laptops – running W7 trials atm, need to upgrade.

So, I am going to buy 3-4 upgrade licenses. Today, I checked pricing and availability of Windows 7 here in Riga, Latvia. Unfortunately, there is no Family Pack available (some people say it might appear after Oct, 31st, when Latvian language Windows is promised). But, price for Home Premium OEM upgrade is quite good ($70 or 50 EUR). Buying Family pack of 3 licenses at amazon UK, would cost the same after shipment. I think I will rather buy HP OEM upgrades here.

I do not have that many Vista or XP licenses (basically all my PC were self made, and laptops came with Linux), but will try to find some old/written-off licenses from sysadmin friends. I know that OEM will work only with one machine, but Retail copy is almost 4 times more expensive (180 EUR) and for that money, I can buy new OEM upgrades later if needed.

I checked to computer shops today and in both, was asked to prove that I have a copy of Windows to upgrade from. Windows label on the bottom of laptop is enough of the proof they said. Interesting, can I show the same laptop in various shops to buy 3-4 upgrade licenses? I think I can.

My new home server build on DualCore Atom

I am in that sweet time phase, when I made my research and ordered the parts. ETA is on Monday. I am building my home server on

Modecom mini ITX case with external power adaptor (96w, $70)

DualCore Intel Atom 330 in Intel D945GCLF2 (90$) – which has 1 IDE, 2 SATA connectors, Gigabit NIC

2GB RAM ($25)

500GB 2.5” laptop hard drive ($100)

and I will reuse my 1TB Barracuda 3.5” SATA from my old server.

Going for a laptop hard drive was a tough decision. I had to consider that laptop drives have limited capacity, that they are 2 more expensive than 3.5” drives, and the fact that 2*3.5 drives do not fit into mini ITX case (at least the cases that I could find in Latvia) because most of MINI-ITX cases support only one 3.5” drive and a slim CD/DVD. An alternative was to go with micro-ATX case, but then I would have to deal with the problem of finding the low-power PSU, which are not available in Latvia at all. Buying those online is possible from mini-box.com or minipc.de, but it costs an arm and a leg (upward of $100), negating any savings on purchasing a larger hard drive.

Moreover, I had to give up any idea of toying with the RAID for data protection. I will backup my personal data, which includes about 30GB of documents, photos and music, between server and my gaming pc hard drive, but for the movies, there will be no backup in this setup. I think that movies are not a critical information, because you can restore most of them from internet. At the same time, I am happy with the setup, because my space requirements will be met for another year. (I managed to fill about 700GB during 1 year). Only the small drive will be running 24x7 for torrents. It consumes less energy than larger drive and make less noise too. By the way, noise was not a consideration in this build, since I have a separate technical room for my computers. If I had to build a completely calm pc (for use on the table or in a living room) I’d had to take more expensive fanless MSI board with SSD drive, which cost too much to my taste anyway.

As for OS, I will be choosing between WHS and FreeNAS. I have seen FreeNAS, and I have yet to try WHS for the first time. And of course, there always is W7 and Ubuntu, but I do not see a benefits to running those on a headless server.

RDP/ Thanx god it’s Friday.

  

Web speeds have improved so much over last 2-3 years, that now it is so easy and convenient to RDP from work to home server, initiate download of Ubuntu 9.04 beta and even burn it to the disk that I loaded into DVD drive in the morning.

Life is good. :)

Adding torrents to utorrent WebUI via bookmarklet

Background

I have utorrent running on my home server (Vista Ultimate) 24hrs*7day a week and have a variety of methods for connecting to it.

1) Remote Desktop Connection - this microsoft client is available for Linux (Ubuntu 8.10 in my case), OS X (Leopard) and all sorts of Windows.

2) WebUI works from firefox (and I think IE7/8 too) on any platform

3) I also use utorrent mobile java program on my Nokia N82 to connect from anywhere via GPRS to manage bandwidth consumption (pause all, resume all) and specific torrents (pause, stop, resume, remove torrent (and data)).

Until now, I mostly used firefox to find a needed .torrent, download it to my desktop, go into my webui page in firefox and upload .torrent file manually. Now I found a new and a very comfortable bookmarklet, that uses javascript to inject webui command into all .torrent links on a webpage. 

To use it, create a bookmark with any name and fill its URL with the code from utorrent forums

You'll need to edit the code by changing to your host and port (e.g. "mydomain.dyndns.org:8080"). If you don't want to login each time, you can even add your login information (e.g. "username:password@mydomain.dyndns.org:8080").

Now, whenever you are on a webpage containing some .torrent links, click your bookmark, then click the .torrent link that you want. It will automatically (in 4 seconds) direct you to your webui where you will see new .torrent added to your list.