Found an inexpensive battery for my Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop at Simple Micro. Fast service. The battery appears to be working fine, and cost half to two-thirds of everyplace else I looked.

We are playing musical servers in the office. This means that my current server, an older Dell 8200 with 512K will get demoted to a low-end workstation, and the current spare workstation, which has 512K, but a Pentium 4 3Ghz and 120 gig drive will become the new server. In preparation for that operation, I used the memory configuration program at Crucial memory, to find out what my options were, and ordered a couple additional sticks to bring the memory up to 2.5Gig. I think this will be enough for the beta of Windows 2008, plus a beta of the Microsoft unified communications server.

In fact, I’m starting to wonder about having a “traditional” file server at all. Already I’ve got a networked printer with its own IP address. You can get networked storage devices, basically a large hard drive with a stripped down operating system, which just plugs into the network.