A return, to an unexpected upgrade

Came back from a nice month of traveling the north shores of Lake Superior from Pancake Bay to Thunder Bay.
More posts and images to come!

To find we most likely had a visit from the lightning deity.
Our main server (and only windows machine) was cooked, 2 large old IDE drives and the ATX power supply were smoked.
As was our 5.1 home theater amp.

Parts to repair the old machine was close to 1/2 of what building a new machine would come to.
So our old amd 64 x2 based server (939)socket, 4Gb ram, with a mix of slow IDE and sata1 drives has been replaced with a
Intel I7 3.4 Ghz 8 thread processor,
8 Gb of memory,
1 sata3 1 terabyte drive
2 sata2 1 terabyte drives
and Radeon HD 6670 with 1Gb of ddr3 memory video.
Waiting to add in a sata3 hot swap bay.
And it has USB 3.0! dang that speeds up transfers to the external backup drives!

Most things recovered clean from the Acronis True Image backups, except the main OS drive, while it recovered it also refused to boot up on the new hardware.
So now there is a clean OS  install of Windows 7 64bit professional too.
That really cleaned things up from years of software installs and removals.


 We also had to replace our old workhorse printer an ancient HP1120c that just kept going and going, since the new machines don't have parallel ports any longer.
Got a little all-in-one (scan,copy,print,fax) wifi Canon printer to replace it.

The home theater amp has also been replaced with a 7.1 channel amp with HDMI switching, cable from the new PC's video card plugs right in and the windows desktop shares seamlessly with the large screen hidef set!
That's a neat new feature for us.

All kinds of Audio and Video cables were removed since now everything is connected with single hdmi cables.

With the change to hdmi or USB and most deviecs having either wifi or bluetooth the former rats-nests of cables are quickly disappearing!

Guess that is another benefit of the unplanned upgrades!

Tonight we are listening to the Train Stories CD by Don Charbonneau which we picked up from the artist when we met him in a shop while visiting Wawa Ontario.