Green computing

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: If you have children, willingly or not you’ll sooner or later become a member of the Flickr-iTunes-YouTube generation. Gazillabytes of video clips, television episodes, music tracks and digital photographs will clog every laptop and desktop in the home.

Several months ago, a new house rule was introduced at Mayhem Manor. All multimedia files downloaded from the web or from camcorders, phones, digital cameras, toasters or whatever were henceforth to be stored in one place, and one place only—on the home server.

But no sooner had the proclamation been issued than the aging piece of iron that served as clippings file, picture library, video store and repository for tax files, medical records and decades of correspondence ground to a whimpering halt, overwhelmed by the influx of enormous divx, avi, wmv and mov files. Clearly, the time had come for the huffing and puffing Pentium server to be pensioned off. But what to replace it with?

There are some fine home servers on the market these days. For $599, Best Buy will sell you a Hewlett-Packard EX470 with a 500-gigabyte hard drive and software to provide all manner of multimedia to as many as ten different networked users. Included in the price is a licensed copy of Microsoft’s nifty Windows Home Server operating system that would cost at least $170 on its own.

But such machines are invariably bulky, noisy and not all that easy to upgrade when better and cheaper components become available. Besides, $599 was rather more than your correspondent had in mind.

Hence the decision to build a home server from scratch. And not just any old server—but a veritable lean, mean and green machine that complied with as many of the 23 criteria laid down by the industry’s EPEAT (electronic product environmental assessment tool) standards as possible.

Green computing is one of the latest fads in the digital domain. Often, it’s dressed up as corporate responsibility and used as a marketing tool. Corporate computer-users may talk about reducing their carbon footprint to slow global warming, but what they really mean is finding ways to slash their electricity bills.