We own a small house. This leads us to get creative room usage. I also believe that the day of the desk top computer is dead. Desk tops are uguly with the large CRTs, and a lot of wires going to a bauge box. Yuck. We mostly us laptops, but found a need for a home server. I went looking around for where to install the home server. I could have use the closet or the garage, but chose the unused 4" in the house wall. For this task, I cut a hole in the interior wall between the dinning room and living room.
The last thing I wanted to do, was to have an super high power motherboard. Sure, speed is great, but electrical usage is an issue. Not that I am a tree hugger, but I am cheap. Think about it, a 300 Watt computer running 24 hours a day will consume 7200 Watts a day, or ruffly $26 a month. I chose to us a VIA 800MHz low power motherboard that runs 20 Watts or $1.73 per month.
For the screen we went with a simple 15" LCD with built in TV tuner. I also installed a camera that faces the front door and linked it to the LCD also. Under the LCD, I built a fold down cabin for the wireless keyboard and the power supplies for the daily gadgets that we have. You know, stuff like cell phones or Palms. I like the way that we can plug the gadgets into the charger and shut the door.
Please excuse the bad pictures. The left picture shows what the computer looks like when closed up. The picture on the right shows the motherboard and the extensive amount of power supplies it takes to run a computer, modem and network routers.
This project was finished in November 2002.