I have a nice but small workspace in my living room. It comes with a docking station for my surface, so my husband can also use the monitor, keyboard, mouse and headsets for home office use or support issues. So we connect our Microsoft Surfaces to that and everything is good. Also I run my CTC-3D-printer software on it, the Arduino IDE and other software I do not use for work but for private issues. Sometimes it happens, that I want to work on some nice projects but my husband is using the docking station and as I get older and older I really need a big monitor, a good mouse and a nice keyboard instead of the stuff the Surface comes with 🙂
So today I decided to get that old HP ProDesk 490 G2 MT from the cellar and throw it under my small little table, grab an old Fujitsu TFT-Display connect this ugly Microsoft Mouse and that horrible Microsoft ergonomic keyboard to put all together and install some nice Windows 10 to use this machine for my private hobbyish things to do.
The Hewlett Packard ProDesk 490 comes with 32 GB of RAM and a i7-4790 8-core-CPU running at 3.60 GHz, so that might be enough for my private things. Horrible what kind of hardware is sitting somewhere in the cellar in my house for years, waiting to be found and used again..
So I’ve set it up and it hast Windows Server 2012 R2 on it and also Hyper V with two Containers. It was kind of a test-machine earlier I think and just got forgotten as my company moved from Dettingen to Reutlingen. Not bad for me now 🙂 I will install Windows 10 on it, but also Hyper V to run some containers with Linux or other OS for experimenting a bit. It has an internal 1 TB WD-SATA-Drive. I will upgrade this later to an SSD I think. But for now I am good with the system.