So conveniently on the day after I lose my phone my computer’s Hard Drive dies, there goes 130GB of personal data. Although I did make a recent backup since I had to send in my motherboard for repair which only came back to me about a week prior. At the moment I’m running my desktop computer with an old old old… old 80GB Maxtor drive which I figured I’d use to try Windows 7 RC while I wait for my hard drive to come back.

So what are my first impressions of Windows 7?

Well… it’s very… blue. I changed as much of the colors that as I could the second the install finished. But so far it seems decent, although my old HDD isn’t attributing anything good to the overall performance. What are my performance ratings?

Processor: 7.3

Memory: 7.5

Aero GFX: 6.1

Gaming GFX: 6.1

HDD: 4.3  (awww……)

Anyway I’ll see how much of it all improves when I get my other HDD back.

The D-Link DNS-323 network attached storage, what a fantastic device. With it’s ultra 500 Mhz ARM processor, 64 MB of memory, Gigabit Ethernet controller, and two SATA 2 3.5″ drive bays all in a little box about the size of a 360 power supply (that ugly brick) *kawaii!!*.

Any who. With a little tweaking, this little box can do so much more than just act as a: samba, ftp, iTunes, uPnP Audio/Video Server, and DHCP server. With a little effort you can go ahead and install yourself a copy of Debian on it and do… well… anything on it. But for those who aren’t as ambitious to void their warranty, you can still use a huge collection of ‘fun_plug’ programs instead.

I’m currently working with the chroot method of installing Debian, if I can avoid flashing a custom firmware and potentially having to install a serial port, both of which void your warranty, I’ll be thrilled.

I have Debian Lenny, Apache 2, and PHP5 currently installed. I’m just working on disabling a few things to get all of the above to work smoothly together.