[ale] Electric bill

[David Hillman]

Our electric bill went up by $15 last month.  Either Georgia Power is
passing on some extra fees or we have to look at how we can use electricity
more efficiently.  Right now we have 3 laptops and 4 desktops that are
plugged in mostly all the time.  One of the laptops (Macbook Pro) is usually
plugged into a 21" NEC monitor pretty much all the time.  One of the
desktops is a dual 604 pin Xeon server with 4 hard drives--that's our VM
server.  The other desktop is a P4 Prescott machine that acts as a security
gateway appliance--it's running Untangle 8.  The last desktop is a Core 2
Duo 2.66 Ghz machine for general use and media serving.  Is that too much.?
 I was contemplating adding an old HP 4U server to the mix, but I thought
better of it.   My latest trip to Fry's had me thinking about replacing all
of the servers with some of those Mini-ITX boards.  However, some of the
boards feel pretty cheap and the others have way more stuff than I need.
 Supermicro has a couple of dual Atom Mini-ITX server boards, but they are
pretty expensive.  You get what you pay for with those boards, though.

I was thinking it would be a good idea for someone to make a Mini-ITX server
board with reconfigurable pin headers (future expansion), a couple of USB
ports, and maybe 5 or so PCI-E x1 slots.  The PCI-E slots can later be
filled with a couple of LAN cards and a RAID card.  Some of the boards
should have silent Atom chips and the others should have 775 sockets.  There
are a lot Core 2 Duo chips that could be reused for light server use.  We
have about 5 Dell machines in our office with dead motherboards, but
perfectly functioning C2D chips.  Even better, make them compatible with
CoreBoot (LinuxBIOS).

What do y'all think?
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