No subject

there is little or no correlation between the price of a computer
or computer component and how long it lasts.

I'm genuinely puzzled by the vastly different prices of computers
which seem to me to offer more or less the same facilities.
Most people, I think, have fairly modest expectations for their laptops;
they want to browse, send e-mail, read newsgroups or forums, 
perhaps look at movies.

As for home servers, the number of services required is very small.
I have two HP MicroServers (in Ireland and Italy)
running dhcpd, httpd, openVPN, openLDAP, dovecot/IMAP, mySQL
and not much more (shorewall, fail2ban, etc).
Each cost under €200, I think, because of HPs crazy pricing system.
But they don't seem to find the load too much for them.
I see servers that cost 5 times as much advertised as "home servers",
and I'm genuinely puzzled what additional or better facilities they offer.

You mention having machines with 16GB RAM.
How exactly is this used?
I just checked my 2 servers;
the one here (I'm in Italy) has 5GB RAM, 4GB of which is free
("Mem:   4829188k total,   847540k used,  3981648k free").
The server in Ireland has 4GB RAM, with 500MB free
("Mem:   3793928k total,  3209440k used,   584488k free").


-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College Dublin