Needs Tidying Up? Looks Fine to Me

My wife thinks it is time I ‘cleaned up’ my computer work area. I don’t really see the problem myself.

On the left is my network-connected Brother colour laser printer; then next to that is my shared Samsung 2010 mono laser printer; then right over against the curtain is my (black) Acer EasyStore Windows Home Server (WHS) providing 4TB of SAN-based network storage. In the middle, on the floor, is my 8 port network switch. To the right of the network switch is a jumble of power cables.

On my main desk going from the back near the curtains is my main computer “Trillian” (with the side panel removed; I really must find that and put it back on), then my 24” DELL screen which is connected to Trillian. Then my ‘old’ 22” LG screen which is connected to my work IBM Lenovo laptop.

I have a keyboard-controlled fast-switching KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) to switch between Trillian and my work laptop so I can use the one keyboard and mouse with both computers—on those days that I work from home and both computers are active. But I can always see what is happening on both computers because the screens do not go through the KVM—they are permanently connected.

On the floor under the desk is a decommissioned computer which I probably could throw about. Nobody wants ‘old’ computers anymore when for about $499 you can buy a new dual core i5-based computer with 320GB of hard disk and 4GB of RAM. In yesterday’s paper Harvey Normal had a HP Pavillion quad core i7-based computer with 1TB of hard disk an 8GB of RAM for $799—and it had a discrete 512MB graphics card.

Can’t see the problem really. Looks like just about any other ‘real’ computer set up.

Anyway if you put four or five hours into sorting it all out it ends up looking just the same in about a month’s time. So why bother?