This machine’s primary duty will be to take over the day-to-day computing tasks from my Macbook freeing it up for mobile-only duties so that I’m not carrying around the primary copies of most of my data every time I leave the house.  In addition, I’ll be virtualizing the two desktop machines I have in the basement today, one of which has succumbed to old age in the past couple of months.  The VMs will provide some added flexibility as far as Operating Systems and some single-duty machines.

For now I’m evaluating a couple of virtualization options to use on the new box when it arrives, and I’m re-working the layout of the home network, splitting out VLANs for the servers to help isolate them a bit from the rest of the network. The main goal of some of this is to play around and learn the technologies, of course.

Some of the VM applications I’m considering include test machines for development, SSH tunnel/proxy for remote access, web server, Mozilla Weave server, secure machine for my office VPN and whatever else my dreams, or nightmares (or conversations with Knightwise) inspire.

The machine should arrive in the next week, unboxing and other additional posts will follow.

One of the true marks of geekdom is the ability to build your own machines from the ground up. Everything from ordering the parts, to gingerly placing in the CPU and glopping on just the right amount of thermal-conductive paste right through to powering up the system for the first time then installing and pimping out the OS of your choice. I’ve been there, its a ton of fun when you finally get everything working just right. It’s also a fair bit of work.

The more pragmatic geek can also buy a system, spec’d to order from companies like Dell or Lenovo. These systems still have pretty much everything you want, professionally assembled and sent to your door. These usually take a few weeks to ship so you need to be a bit more patient but there’s a lot less work involved.

So, what about price? Most of the time the price is pretty comparable for a complete system. I priced out a system with the following basic requirements from both Dell and a local computer retailer:

• Intel Core i7 860
• 8GB of Memory
• Windows 7 Pro

The two systems came out less than $80 apart with some minor differences in specs, hard drive size, optical drive, video card etc. For the most part it was the same system, and essentially the same price.

So what does it come down to? Is one option truly better than any other? The best advice I can give is that you need to get yourself a system you can trust. If that means you want professionals to put the system together for you and certify it, then that’s the route you need to take. If, however, you’re the Richard Stallman of computer builds and you feel that you need to free each of the components and build a computer that’s independent of “the man” and that’s where you derive the most value, then that should be your choice.

Image courtesy Frigante on Flickr.