With me hosting my own website and files, I’ve been asking a lot lately from my tiny old home PC.It’s custom configuration of Windows 7 Home Premium, 4GB Ram, Quad Core AMD CPU and a Western Digital Raptor Hard Drive. This got me thinking enough to ask the question, how much is too much. What can a computer handle exactly?
Currently this PC is running at 90% memory usage, and 100% CPU usage. So it’s safely close to maximum and probably swapping to the page file a lot at the moment
On this PC at the moment I’m doing the following
- Running Google Chrome and Firefox (surfing web, website testing)
- Playing youtube
- Running a virtual machine for development (Windows 7)
- Running a webserver (Apache, MySQL, PHP)
- Running a backup software
- Listening to windows media player
- Running an exchange server
- Recording a cctv feed
- Running all background and host apps (antivirus etc)
- Folding on all CPU cores with SMP client (folding at home) – 100%
So this little beasty is doing well to be honest. I can’t wait for the new build. How much is too much, enough until your PC calls quits. I’ll reward it with some increased hardware and being a controller of my newly built cluster when I make it
It’s safe to say computers have advanced so far you can easily run virtual machines with the simplest of hardware now and still chuck more at the computer
