[35g700]

This year I am doing a PC servicing class at my school. With this class comes the ability to download all kinds of software for free. (totally legal) I am going to download just about all of it and There is a copy of windows server 2000, server 2003, and server 2008 (well a couple of each like advanced, enterprise) and I want to try to have a cheap home server that I can learn on and maybe but music on it and other things. Now the server does not have to be the latest and greatest server out there just one that is capable of running 2000, and 2003. (not 2008 we will probably use that on our real home server) I was thinking something among the lines of either:

a P3, or like an AMD Sempron, probably and AGP video card if the video is not integrated. I already have a lot of the stuff so here is a list of what I have:

-420Watt PSU
-AGP video card
-Available 512MB OR 1GB stick of DDR memory, OR 512MB of SDR DIMM memory.
-CD Drive
-OS
-Monitor
-Keyboard
-Mouse


Anyways try to keep things to the lowest possible price the most expensive thing in the CHEAP server should be the HDD.

Thanks!

[Saxon]

PSU an Hard Drives are things you should NEVER cheep out on.

Server 03 will have a hard time running on a p3 an good luck with 08, I would use BSD or Linux on the server as they are the leading server OS's (world wide) and there is more options available.

Also if you use a standard cheep mobo an take the windows rout you may have problems getting the drivers to work on the server (this is another reason to choose linux)

Also what do you call cheep? Do you have a case are you going to need this to last a while?

[Puddle Jumper]

This motherboard/cpu combo is about as cheapo as you are going to get and a Sepron 3000+ is way better than a p3.

Newegg.com - ECS Goal3+(1.1C) AMD Sempron 3000+ 754 SiS 761 GX Micro ATX Motherboard/CPU Combo - Motherboard / CPU / VGA Combo

[35g700]

The PSU is a good PSU, and I was not planning on buying a bad HDD just one that isn't all that big. My parents used to own a computer shop so they know a lot about computes and we do have a server and I think I we will be able to put 2008 on that but that is a different story, (my dad wants to have 2, one with server 2008 and one with linux) so all i really need is a P3 or a cheap AMD Sempron maybe a P4/Celeron. No the computer is not going to be an long lasting computer just one that I can use as a server to learn on.

[m6qrp]

in that case, i suggest you try to get a second hand server off ebay. somehere along the lines of a dual cpu p3 or a p4. i dont recommend you get a celeron or sempron cause they are not really powerful and were not designed for server use.

Some of these would be great but you may need to get some SCSI hdd for more storage space.

IBM xSeries 365 DUAL P4 XEON MP 2Ghz 1024Mb Server - eBay (item 290263694469 end time Oct-01-08 18:37:24 PDT)

web server - Celeron 2.0 GHz - eBay (item 130256964169 end time Sep-27-08 21:43:09 PDT)

Compaq Proliant DL580 QUAD PIII XEON 900Mhz 18Gb Server - eBay (item 290263472847 end time Sep-30-08 18:45:11 PDT)