Each year, I make a radical change to my home office. This is the 14×10 foot 2nd bedroom in our apartment that is used to develop my online presence, work from home when I’m sick, create podcasts, watch movies and edit photos that I take. It’s very important to me and that’s why I still have a 30” CRT television that I bought from my dad for $150 dollars 2 years ago because I keep taking money and putting it into my office instead of finally getting that flat screen TV.

Timeline:

2005: Purchased a dual 2.0 PowerMac G5 and Dual 1.5 Xserve and a new Klipsch 5.1 speaker system. I also got an EyeTV system for watching TV.

2006: Purchased a Core2Duo MacBook (2GHz) and 20” Dell LCD. Laura gave me a beautiful big glass desk which I still use today

2007: Purchased a MacBook Pro (2.33GHz), my speakers died to I bought a 5.1 Logitech system and added some more hard drives to my system. I also jumped into virtualization by installing Windows XP via Parallels Desktop.

2008: We moved and so my office grew larger.
My job has changed drastically in the past 12 months and I’m training more and more on Microsoft technology. So I have some new gear. I didn’t buy all of this. A lot of it was part of my job.

1. I got a Dell Inspiron 530 with a 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Quad CPU, NVIDIA 8800 GT graphics card and a terabyte of storage in Raid1.
2. A Dell 24” monitor for my MacBook Pro and I moved the 20” monitor to the Dell.
3. Upgraded Laura’s PowerBook to Leopard and finally updated the software on her iPod and iPhones to the latest versions (she’s so bad about that)
4. Moved to VMWare Fusion on my MacBook pro cause VMWare kicks so much ass! Installed Windows XP Professional and Windows Vista Ultimate on my MacBook Pro, upgraded the ram to 4GBs and installed a 7200RPM 300GB hard drive (up from 2GBs of ram and 5400RPM 160GB HD).
5. Upgraded the Dell to Windows Vista Ultimate and virtualized Server 2008 Enterprise on it and installed Adobe CS3 Design Premium on my MacBook Pro, Laura’s PowerBook and the new Dell.
6. Consolidated my Mac’s external hard drives so now I have 4 external drives equaling 2 terabytes of storage.
7. Setup a domain using server 2008 and connected all Windows OSes to it configuring login scripts and using group policy through the domain.
8. Installed Microsoft Office 2008 Professional on mine and Laura’s Macs
9. Installed Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate on the Dell and the virtual guest operating systems.

As you can see, this was a complete network upgrade that also consisted of reloading the operating systems on both of our Macs. Over the last 3 weeks, I’ve installed 4 instances of Windows, 2 Macintosh reloads and configured a crap load of software and hardware. I’ve also rearranged and managed all office cabling and reconfigured mine and Laura’s backup plans so we now have a single NAS backing up important documents off-site using Mozy (that was just released for Mac). Don’t worry. I didn’t buy everything here. I can attest that every software title was purchased legally by my work or me and, luckily, I have a job where they really take care of their employees. The latest technology helps employees learn more and progress.

If you’re wondering why it’s been so slow lately, that’s why. There was a complete network deployment going on at my place and it feels nice to have all of that completed. Now, I just need a Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000 for the Dell and some audio equipment so we can setup multiple microphones. At this point, I can only use two microphones for our podcasts but would like to use 4 so that’s the next step.