Well, I got the computer home, hooked it all back up, booted it, and it’s running fine right now. However, I think the pre-HP splash screen time was still a bit longer that it should have been. But, during that time I listened closely and I could hear hard drives spinning up. Ok, I’ll admit that I have two internal drives and three external USB drives connected to this thing. (About 10TB of storage.) I’m starting to think that I need to separate the media-server aspects of this computer from the “I need to get work done” aspects. So, the new plan is to take one of the older computers sitting in my home office and turn that into a headless media & backup server that sits on the network in a completely different room and let my desktop computer, be the “boot it up when I need it, shut it down when I don’t” computer like normal people have.
So, as to setting up a media server, I’m thinking linux (Ubuntu specifically) instead of Windows. Since I’m not planning on connecting a monitor to it, does anyone have experience with remote login to an Ubuntu box? (I generally use LogMeIn.com but there isn’t version (that would work for me) for Linux.
David says his only experience is that he never got it to work.
Well, I’ve been running some tests and it looks like any generic VNC client (on the Windows end) will work (providing you’ve turned on remote desktop on the Ubuntu end.) The only glitch is that the screen won’t refresh properly with Unity 3D so you need to run Unity 2D on the Ubuntu end.