I had thought about getting a new some server, a little mac mini or something — just something that would quietly sit there and run a little home webserver and act as the print/fileserver for the house with the various music files etc all stored there.  Except that fluffy is now hesitating on getting rid of his mac mini which gave me some time to rethink the situation.

What I’m thinking now is to use my broken laptop as the home server.  It’s certainly more than powerful enough — moreso than a mac mini would be that’s for sure.  And because I’ve got my work laptop now there really is little need for having two laptops around all the time.   Right now I’ve been using my work laptop for work stuff and trying to use my home laptop for home stuff — which is very difficult because of how difficult it is to prop the screen up correctly because the LCD hinge is badly broken.

The only drawback to this idea is that my work laptop runs windows, and as you probably know by now I really hate windows with a certain passion.  I’m not stupid enough to try to install a linux distribution overtop of my work drive, but something else may work ok.  What I’m thinking is that I can run Linux under VMWare at fullscreen when I’m home, pretty much ignoring that there is another OS sitting underneath.

This is what I’m doing now, just to see how irritating this would actually be.  So far it’s not too bad really.  It’s a little bit slower than I’d like, but everything works like it should so really I shouldn’t complain.