My 10 yr old daughter want a new computer.

[piasabird]

Tell her she has to earn half the money and make her work for it. In reality, you might need a new computer so consider what you want to do.

 

[sdifox]

hosted mc game server sounds like the safe bet.

 

[Nhirlathothep]

Our home computer is a "public" computer that we use mostly for email and internet. However, she uses it for Minecraft a lot. It blue screens once a month or so but the most annoying part is that the mouse and / or keyboard will lock up with heavy use. Sometimes with in 5 minutes of sitting down. I've changed those out with misappropriated parts from work a couple of times so it's not those. The monitor is not bad except for some dead pixels. Or it might be the chocolate milk and Oreo's. Not sure yet.
Anyway.
She wants a new one. So I figured, yeah, okay. It's been a while since I put one together myself for fun. However, she doesn't want any old computer. She wants an NSA server level thing. You know, so I can set up a Minecraft server for all her 100 friends. She wants ECC! She has no idea what that means. Virtualization world; I'm like huh? As my wife is being a "peanut gallery" in the other room, laughing, telling me my budget is a hundred bucks and such.
So I told her no. You can set up the server yourself. I got it trouble for that later because she's only 10.

I want to know what ATOT thinks I should do.
Should I build a 24 core rack assembly in the garage? Get an Xbox (We've never had anything like that)?
Tell her to go play outside without her wifi connected Ipod pad thingie?
Or spend some time with her outside; say a bike ride?

she wants a tablet

 

[Sonikku]

Be a man and drop 1080 SLI into that thing.

 

[Childs]

You can rent Minecraft servers. Probably something like a 30 person server for $20 a month. That way if she gets bored with it later just discontinue the rental. I'd still get her a decent PC though. Playing games on a crap PC really sucks. Just make it the new family PC.

 

[lxskllr]

Servers are good for more than minecraft. You can use it as a private, personal cloud. Setup libre social networking that doesn't spy on you. Host a media server a la youtube/flikr... Lots of stuff you can do, and you can do it together.

 

[ultimatebob]

Servers are good for more than minecraft. You can use it as a private, personal cloud. Setup libre social networking that doesn't spy on you. Host a media server a la youtube/flikr... Lots of stuff you can do, and you can do it together.

Yeah... A few years from now, she can be hosting beefcake porn for her friends

 

[ultimatebob]

THIS! She deserves it, you're an ATOT dad, after all. You know you can afford it.

Edit: More seriously, though, that's good that she's interested in the technical aspects at 10. Could get her set in a career in IT this way. I would "explore options" for building the server, with the caveat that a $100 budget might be slightly on the light side.

I can't help you with any specifics, because I've never played MineCraft, nor set up a MC server.

I'd go one better and teach her how to host an EC2 Linux instance running Minecraft in AWS. Our uptime is going to be WAY better than your piddly home server if we set up hot failover in another availability zone.

That way, she'll be ready to take over my DevOps job when I retire

 

[Red Squirrel]

That's cool that she actually wants ECC ram. At 10 I was still putting paper clips and foil paper in sockets and barely even knew anything about computers except that you could use MS paint and solitaire on one.

If you actually want to go with a real server, I'd look at Supermicro, they're not that expensive and still decently "standard" as opposed to the super proprietary stuff you'd get from Dell, HP etc.

Of course a brand new server is not going to fix the issue with the existing computer, you need to build two machines now.

 

[brianmanahan]

i'd make her write an RFP

 

[brianmanahan]

honestly it'd probably be better just to get a linode server and host it there

 

[KMFJD]

Excellent time to advise her to go find a job to help pay for a new one

\10 year olds can work can't they?

 

[Ruptga]

Excellent time to advise her to go find a job to help pay for a new one

\10 year olds can work can't they?

That's around the time I started cutting grass at home. We had a cheap riding mower which was a win-win. It wouldn't break me because there was no way to fall under it, and me breaking it wouldn't matter too much because it was cheap. I never did break it either, guess I never really applied myself.

 

[piasabird]

You are lucky if you can get a 10 year old to clean up their own room or pick up their dirty clothes. I was thinking of something like and Andy Griffith show where the sheriff tells his son he has to earn some of the money to get a new bike or something like that. The point is this should be good for a few chores and maybe a lemonaid stand and possibly a school fund raiser or something like that. Then just help her out a bit after she makes an effort to earn her money. If you were paying her an allowance you could make contribute some of that I guess. It is similar to Elf on the Shelf.

There is always
washing dishes
folding laundry
Vacuum and Dusting
Washing car
Raking Leaves
Cake sale

Go Fund Me . . .

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

Take her camping.

 

[ctbaars]

Take her camping.

That is exactly what she's doing now! With her Day Camp friends though at the camps gym since it's raining. They were supposed to go to Short Beach overnight. She's trying again tonight but this time with the girl scouts at the same beach.
The PC is in flux. Out of sight, out of mine you know. I've been window shopping at Newegg and I have to tell you. What a fun site to play with. It's a really well laid out shopping site. I use www.mouser.com a lot for work. These are two best shopping sites I've ever seen.
The wife says now it also has to hook up with the TV too. Not so bad, just another cable I guess. Of course I mentioned that the budget has to add another two zero's now.