Retiring Gandalf-3

It's all about choices.  Was there really anything wrong with my outgoing workhorse ?  OK, the graphics were a little slow, seeing as the onboard nForce4 chipset
really didn't cut it even for desktop effects (workspaces on cubes, for example), and it had only six USB ports, two SATA ports, and no eSATA, and I'm pretty sure the Ethernet port
wasn't Gigabit Ethernet.  Seeing as I only had one 250GB SATA HDD and an ATAPI DVD Writer, my keyboard, mouse, camera and thumb-drive were the only USB devices I owned,
did it really matter at all?

The original design parameters - fast, reliable, quiet and energy saving - are all still met by G3.  My AMD Athlon 64 3000+ based system consumes a grand total of 55W under normal load,
courtesy of the AMD Cool'andQuiet technology, I rarely ran the processor at the full 1800MHz, opting to have it step up as needed from the baseline 1GHz.  The super silent "SILENT" power
supply, processor fan and a single 120mm case fan kept things running reliably for months on end (211 days till I shut it down for this upgrade).  The MSI 7207 motherboard
was unspectacular, but proved a reliable building block.

However, times change.  I've been spending too much time tearing out what little hair I have left producing fashion show videos (don't ask). Editing them on an iMac is ok, but doing the
format conversion twice take hours, if not days - once to get my Samsung NV24HD native 720p format into something the Mac can edit and convert again prior to uploading to Vimeo, Youtube and Facebook.

Also, my desktop ended up doing more and more infrastructure, which is just plain wrong - it acted as a squid proxy to fix the fact that my Wii would otherwise time out whilst connecting to the Internet.  It did some rudimentary MediaPC stuff via the Wii as a front-end - playing music and movies.  It also acted as a Oracle APEX development machine and database engine. All of which meant that I never got to switch the desktop off, 'cuz "other" people might be using it.

Moreover - and after all the push-factors I mentioned, here's the one pull-factor - helmsdeep was in need of a refresh, and being the bastion system for my home network, was where squid should really have been running to begin with, so ... the project begins.