Originally posted by Mike Johnson
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Over many years, my approach to home automation has changed. I started with a few X10 devices and 16 button controller. Over the next 10 years I added more capability and my system grew into a dedicated Home automation XP tower PC running HS2. Everything worked well and for a 2-3 year period I left the system alone. About 4 years my computer crashed and I could not restore it from my backup disks. So I spent a year getting it up and running again. It was a painful process. During that time XP was discontinued and HS3 was announced. Realizing that XP was dead, I decided to migrate to HS3 and I setup another desktop Win 7 machine to run HS3. I moved my Z-wave stuff to HS3, but I had a lot of hardware that used RS232 serial interfaces. New computers do not have serial ports. Initially, HS3 was not very stable and was constantly being updated. I found that I was restarting HS3 almost daily. That led to a 3rd home automation low power netbook computer to see if it could run HS3. Then another Dell laptop computer looked promising so I set it up to run my IP security cameras and HS3. By the end of 2015, I was spending several hours per day just keeping all this stuff running. But I also learned that I would never be able to return to a single computer running everything.
When Windows 10 arrived, I upgraded my Dell desktop and I saw an immediate improvement in the stability of that computer.
The cost, form factor, Win 10, and low power usage of the Dell3050 convinced me to try it. I started running HS3 on it in 3 months ago and it has worked extremely well.
My strategy now is to have multiple small home automation computers with each one dedicated to certain activities. So I have purchased another Dell3050 and I will soon use it to control my HVAC system.
Steve Q
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