Kevin Weatherly

kevinweatherly.net

Building a Home IT Lab

I was assigned a new role at work last month. That might sound like a bad thing, but I’m pretty happy to do it because it’s work of a technical nature – Tier 2 Technical Support over email. I haven’t done technical support in 21 years, and it’s nice to use those skills at work […]

I was assigned a new role at work last month. That might sound like a bad thing, but I’m pretty happy to do it because it’s work of a technical nature – Tier 2 Technical Support over email. I haven’t done technical support in 21 years, and it’s nice to use those skills at work again.

Thanks to COVID-19, many of us are still working from home. I wanted a sandbox to be able to install the products on VirtualBox under a variety of operating systems.

I picked up this 11-year-old Dell Server Tower and got a large Ikea desk, so I could have two stations in my guest room closet-office. According to the device’s spec sheet, it’s not in the same exact configuration as it might have originally been. For one thing, it had up to 32 GB of RAM and now it has 16 GB. I am still happy to have it – especially at the price I paid. I still want to double the current RAM, though.

So far I have VMs for Windows, Android, and Linux Mint. I plan to work on some others over the holiday weekend.

Current Specs from Speccy

Summary

Operating System
⦿ Windows 10 Pro 64-bit

CPU
⦿ Intel Xeon E3 1220 @ 3.10GHz⦿ 38 °C
⦿ Sandy Bridge 32nm Technology

RAM
⦿ 16.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 665MHz (9-9-9-24)

Motherboard
⦿ Dell Inc. 015TH9 (CPU1)

Graphics
⦿ DELL P2210 (1680×1050@60Hz)
⦿ Matrox Microsoft Basic Display Adapter (Dell)

Storage
⦿ 698GB ATA WDC WD7501AALS-7 SCSI Disk Device (SATA )⦿ 45 °C
⦿ 1853GB Microsoft Storage Space Device (TMax (SSD))

Audio
⦿ DisplayLink USB Audio Adapter

An Unmodified Android Instance Running on VirtualBox