I use an Asus 14 inch laptop as my music server. I use a 2 tb external USB3 hard drive for my music storage. This way the operating system is on one drive and music is on the other. My laptop uses the Intel i3 processor with 4gb of ram and a 320gb internal hard drive.
I run J Rivers Media Player and I have no problems with the set up. It is very quick accessing over 10,000 songs on the USB drive. You can shut off a lot of the Windows services which is what I did. It sounds wonderful through my Wyred4Sound Dac and the Musical Fidelity v link 192 usb/spdif converter. Actually, it sounds better than my 8,500.00 Esoteric SACD player.
I run J Rivers Media Player and I have no problems with the set up. It is very quick accessing over 10,000 songs on the USB drive. You can shut off a lot of the Windows services which is what I did. It sounds wonderful through my Wyred4Sound Dac and the Musical Fidelity v link 192 usb/spdif converter. Actually, it sounds better than my 8,500.00 Esoteric SACD player.