Some excellent replies here, thank you all! General replies: 1. I will not donate this computer as it's the only spare one I have. I do promise though to dona

Some excellent replies here, thank you all! General replies: 1. I will not donate this computer as it's the only spare one I have. I do promise though to donate the next spare one I get. 2. It's a laptop, so turning it into an aquarium is not going to work. Poor fish. 3. The reaon that it's spare and not donatable is that the screen connection is very very loose and so the Force of Duct Tape is what's keeping it alive. What I've decided to do based on the replies: 1. Install Linux (of course) and set up a central backup server, attach the house's printer to it, and attach the current external backup drive. 2. Turn it into a media server. I'll be trying both MythTV and XBMC and will report later. 3. I will donate the spare CPU cycles to Folding@Home, at least initially. BOINC and other distributed computing projects will get time. Maybe I'll cycle once a month. Thank you again :)