[wplug] Redesigning my home network

[Pat Barron]

The weakest links in your desktop system (based on your desire to make 
it a general purpose server capable of virtualization) appear to be the 
processor and memory.

Your system has a low-end processor that doesn't support AMD-V (so, no 
virtualization).  From the motherboard spec, it appears you could put in 
a different processor:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?cc=us&lc=en&docname=c01701270

(Do open up your machine and make sure the model number on the 
motherboard matches what's pictured here - it's silk-screened in the 
middle of the board).

Assuming you have enough power available (and assuming your BIOS 
supports it - you probably want to re-flash your BIOS with the latest 
available from HP's web site, before you try anything like this), you 
could potentially put in an Athlon II X4 or Phenom II X4 processor which 
would be a better fit for what you're trying to do. (Assuming you can 
actually find a reasonable Socket AM2+ processor, they're getting really 
difficult to find...)

The more difficult issue is memory.  Your motherboard only has has two 
DDR2 DIMM slots, and the motherboard spec says it doesn't support 
anything larger than 2GB DIMMs.  So your system is already maxed out on 
memory (two 2GB DIMMs).  This will constrain the number of virtual 
systems you can run, and what you can use them for (for instance, Fedora 
17 won't even install with any less than 1GB of RAM - though the reason 
for that is because anaconda now requires that much memory to do the 
installation - you could allocate 1GB to install, then reduce the 
allocation to 512MB after installation, if that would work for what 
you're doing).

--Pat.