Multiple PCs in the Household
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how people use multiple PCs in their household, why bother to get multiple PCs and what unique issues arise about having these multiple PCs. The funny thing here is that most of the people I can easily turn and talk to aren’t what I’d consider the average type person out there (including myself). There are people here who have 4 or 5 machines some with specific purposes or others who just simply have a PC for everyone in the household and some have servers running the family website and managing the household in the background.
My setup is again pretty unique. I’ve got a main PC for the house running multiple monitors that pretty much is the exclusive use of my wife for surfing the net, managing the club she belongs to, and doing email. I’ll use it occasionally to look at our finances, but that’s about it. Meanwhile, we have another machine sitting next to this one for our girls to use, and then there’s a 1+ TB PC out in the garage that serves up children’s TV shows to the Replay in the family room. Like I said, not typical at all. Of course all this means that I have to be the household IT professional, making sure that the machines are working, on and that something hasn’t failed (like a drive in the server out in the garage) or that the broadband connection to the router is working fine, etc. The funny thing however is that my main machine at home is my laptop (or tablet) depending on which I’m actually using at the time. So in a lot of ways the home infrastructure really isn’t all that important to me personally other than the fact that I can get a wireless connection to the internet.
Okay so what I really want to know from people is not what their setup is, but rather what are the things that are hassles for them that are the results of having multiple PCs? And what do you do about it? I’ve got my list, but I don’t want to contaminate or steer the direction in any particular way, I want to hear what you all have to say!
