Hi,
I thought users who are thinking of migrating Win 7 music server may want read about this. Some Win 8 OS users seem to think this OS sounds better than Win 7. For whatever reasons you may find this interesting and hopefully useful.
There are a number of 8" window based tablets available now, e.g. Dell Venue Pro 8, Lenovo Miix 2 8, Toshiba, ASUS, etc. Recently I was able to acquire a refurbished Lenovo MiiX 2 8(comes with Win 8.1 free) at less than US$140 plus postage. There are a few similar spec. Chinese tablets selling for less than US$180 at Ebay and elsewhere.
I use this Tablet as my music server(running win8.1), the features are:
1*USB port(also used as a charger)
2G Memory
32G SSDisk
32G SD micro for music storage
USB port connected to external powered USB HUB which has 4 ports connected to
1 - External Harddisk
2 - USB DAC
3 - CDROM
4 - wired mouse
see image attached.
Advantages:
1. A compact system
2. Server is battery powered
3. Can use variety of music players, I use J River V20 and Fidelizer 6.1
4. Cheap alternative that sounds good.
Disadvantages:
1. Limited memory(2G)
2. Hard disk space(32G)
3. I cannot seem to get Hibernation mode to work. ie. option is not available.
Overall this arrangement works very well and yet sounds very good indeed.
