In the unlikely event that anybody cares, here is what my computer setup looks like now.

It is very compact, as there is not a lot of room in the house. To the right of the monitor is my 60 ipm* scanner, below the keyboard is a 20 ppm color laser printer, left of the printer is the subwoofer for my sound system and on top of that is an APC UPS with eleven A/C things plugged into it! (Used to be 16, but I moved the cable modem, the router, the OOMA phone, the OOMA base station, and the local phone over to SWMBO's UPS.) Behind the monitor on the left is a Vantec external HD dock with my 2-TB backup drive in it. There's another external drive you can't see behind the scanner. The monitor will swing back flat against the wall to give unimpeded desktop space when needed. If you look carefully you'll see the pickup for the wireless mouse stuck to the wall next to the scanner. There are shelves below the keyboard tray for storing four reams of printer paper.

I deliberately did not show the top of the computer hutch which is piled a foot and a half high with really ugly-looking odds and ends: CD/DVD containers, cables, some headphones, tape, dust-off cans, spare video card, my Rosetta Stone software box, etc.

I apologize for the ugly hand-lettered labels on the USB hubs but the cables are all different lengths and when I try to run them through my laser printer I keep getting "Unexpected Paper Size" errors. When I get that sorted out I'll print the cables up real pretty with an Arial Black font. In addition to the 14 USB ports populated on the hubs, there are two more (headphones and Flash Drive) coming out of the front of the tower. Yes, it is a pretty loaded system. The keyboard is PS2.

The computer is nothing too special by today's standards, but it was pretty hot stuff when we built it in 2007 with dual-core 3gHz AMD processor, 4 GB RAM, 256MB video card, and [now] more than 6-TB of hard drive (including the two external backup drives). There is also a pair of 2-TB backup drives kept off-premises.

All in all it is an ergonomically friendly and extremely space-efficient setup, and I am quite pleased with it.

tanstaafl.

* 30 ppm duplex = 60 Images Per Minute