On 16/08/2015 11:37, Keith (Southend) wrote:
I'm interested with this as like yourself I have this old PC running
24/7, which must use some electricity over time and the onlt reason is
for updating from my WMII every 15 minutes. Can you also upload to WOW?
Do you have to connect a monitor to it?

I used to have a dedicated home built PC to run all the time for my
weather station, sunshine recorder, media server and website uploads
etc. Even with an 'energy' efficient power supply unit and restricting
the processor and services, it still used around 20 to 40 watts.

I toyed with idea of a laptop but all the ones I tested used around 30
watts.

Then I discovered a netbook called Asus Eee PC which had an Atom
processor and was fanless. I bought a second-hand one off Ebay for £60
and I now use that for all the weather stuff, and as a media and VPN
server. It works flawlessly with Windows 8.1 and can run for months (I
suspect years) without me having to touch or reboot it. I can log in
remotely from anywhere to access files or even use remote desktop from
the internet. It uses around 5 to 10 watts. With only 1GB of RAM I have
installed a 16 GB class 10 SDHC memory card and set it as ReadyBoost
memory. That works a treat and speeded everything up immensely. I have
had it running now for nearly 3 years and it has never crashed, faulted
in anyway.

It has worked better than I had imagined and only uses the tiniest
amount of electricity. It has a 2TB USB drive attached where I store all
my music, photos etc and also the HTPC records all its programs to it.
Using the VPN I can access this from the internet. Having an upload
internet speed of 10 Mbps helps.

--
Nick Gardner
Otter Valley, Devon
20 m amsl
http://www.ottervalley.co.uk