Peter's Blog

What with it being the Christmas holidays I found a spare couple of hours to set up the Docking Station for my Dell D410 Laptop. I set it up thusly:

• 17" CRT monitor
• Packard bell keyboard
• Packard bell wireless mouse
• USB 2 Hub
• External USB hard Drive
• Wired network so I can play with wake-on-lan and access it from the internet

I need to buy a long audio cable so I can plug it into the hifi.

It makes a nice system, the Dell is faster than the desktop. I still use the desktop system for the following:

• Canon USB Scanner
• Nightly backup of remote server

I could do my scanning on the laptop and I could set it up to do the nightly server backup as well. Since I set the desktop machine up for nightly backup I haven't got around to getting it to shut down automatically so one of my bedtime tchores is to turn it off. Once that is done I don't need the desktop...

I would like to set the laptop up for a nightly backup to the external hard disk: turn itself on at 3am, backup, then switch itself off. I'd like to figure out the most efficient way to do that: weekly full, and daily incremental maybe. This could be combined with the remote server backup.

The only disadvantage of a laptop over a desktop for me is that it has no PCI slots: the only PCI slot I could use is my TV card and I only need that to capture my wedding video (2 years, 3 months, still haven't got around to doing that). I'm not into games now (did I mention I'm married?) so I'm not inclined to upgrade the graphics: I'd buy an XBox 360 for that.