Matthew C Good : Musician, Web Developer, Hobbyist.

I’m preparing myself to lose a good friend soon – my roughly six-year-old laptop is about to meet its end. The right hinge has completely separated from the body again, and its straining the left hinge now – it won’t be long until the whole LCD separates from the rest of the chassis. The laptop in question, an old Pentium III dell latitude c610 with an upgraded 768 megs of ram, a 40 gig hard drive and a 1400×1050 pixel lcd screen (!!!), was like my old Toyota Camry – it probably should have died long before it did. But we had been through some good and rough times together, and its had to see an old friend go, even if the thing is getting to be a bit slow, broken, dimly-lit, cracked, dirty, noisy, and non-functional.
So now the question becomes – what to do with a laptop that will likely be in two pieces in the very near future? I’m thinking about using it as a linux server to handle synching to the soon-to-be-debuted GDrive, along with any other server-related tasks (i.e. media sharing, etc) that need to be done around here. This is a dell, however, so there is the chance that the power adapter might EXPLODE iwhtout warning one day.
To replace this and my aging recording computer, I’m planning on building a sweet dual flat/widescreen recording/everything computer, and getting a cheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep refurb laptop for internet and email while lounging around the house. Any thoughts on what awesome I should be sure to throw in the super-great desktop would be accepted.