A Tinkering Day

Late last night, I discovered Walmart was selling a 6 TB hard drive for $125. It's not the greatest deal in the world, but with today's pricing I'll take it. Having a second drive gives me the space I need to make some changes. The drive was delivered from my local store this morning, so I got to work on finishing up some mini-tech projects I had sitting around.

First, I went to work on my new budget emulation machine. I moved some more games over and then compressed the games with a built-in compressor. That saved me even more space, so now I can keep expanding my PS2 library which already sits at over fifty games.

I also watched a few YouTube videos so I could learn how to make adjustments to improve the graphics. My first attempt went quite well, although I am experiencing some slow down in certain games (the fights in NHL Hitz 2003, the entire game for Simpsons Road Rage), so I need to keep tinkering. That's for another day.

While all that was going on, I started moving files from my portable external hard drive to my new external hard drive. My goal is use the portable for my Plex streaming only, so I removed everything else. Then I went about renaming and organizing files and removing anything I've watched and don't plan on rewatching. My goal is to make as much space as possible for growth, especially as I need move a few seasons of Stargate Atlantis over.

I bought my wife a MacBook Neo a few weeks ago, so now our Lenovo Yoga 6 really has no use. It's always been a bit too small for me, so I've decided to move my Plex server from my six year old HP All-In-One onto this laptop so I can keep it near my router. So, I cleaned everything off of it that I could, debated about installing Linux, but I decided if I run into any problems, I'm just more familiar with Windows. So, I got the server up and running and everything was working fine. However, despite changing the setting for the laptop to go to sleep when the lid is closed, it somehow disconnected after a short period of time. I'm hoping its not the wi-fi, but I'm going to have to troubleshoot this some. Until I get around to that, if I need to use my Plex, I'll just open the laptop up.

This isn't my ideal set up by any means, but I'm making the best of what I have lying around while trying to keep all spending to minimum. I feel like I made some great progress, I just have a few kinks to work out, which I'll hopefully get to this week.

Now I just need to figure out what to do with the HP. Honestly, I don't use it much, but it does have some PC games installed on it. I'm experiencing major cord fatigue, so part of me wants to get rid of it, but I guess I'll think on this a bit more before doing anything hasty.