Is it possible?

I'm starting to think I have too many PCs in my house.

I have my Acer Aspire One, which I bought for use while traveling, and it works really nicely, but it doesn't *quite* have enough power to stream high def video from Amazon. Video was a bit jerky. But what could I do? My laptop was shutting itself off.

Well, the replacement parts for my laptop showed up, and maybe I didn't need them. The fan and heat sink were clogged with dust, and maybe I could have just cleaned them. But, having fresh parts meant I could just drop them in place instead of spending lots of time trying to get bits of very old, clingy dust out of a fan assembly. Plus - what if the fan was dying? I'd have to take the laptop apart again. So, yeah, fresh parts were good.

But then I realized I couldn't futz around in Sacred (a Diablo-like game that Pat and I have been playing) while watching a movie that I only have on the laptop; the Aspire won't play Sacred. This isn't horrible, but I've been leveling a new character to have for our higher level game. That's when I remembered that I have a Dell GX270 I bought as a Linux box. I hadn't booted it up in a long time because it always had trouble with its SATA drive, but didn't I have it's original IDE? Why, yes, I did. So I loaded a spare copy of Windows XP on it, and it plays Netflix streaming beautifully.

(Did I mention I bought a Sony Bravia 26" LCD TV with the money I received for Christmas? It has VGA input, you see. Low resolution given the screen size, but I think that's because it's intended to be used as a TV, not a monitor. Isn't that weird?)

But before I could watch TV, I had to set up some video conversions; I'm ripping my Buffy disks to MP4 files so that I can watch them on an iPod or Zune. So I did that on my main desktop.

Well, that's only four PCs for one person, and that's not *too* bad. (We'll ignore the old PC that's at Pat's place, or the laptop I gave to her, because that would make a total of 6, which is probably excessive. And besides, they're *hers* now.)

Is it possible?

I'm starting to think I have too many PCs in my house.

I have my Acer Aspire One, which I bought for use while traveling, and it works really nicely, but it doesn't *quite* have enough power to stream high def video from Amazon. Video was a bit jerky. But what could I do? My laptop was shutting itself off.

Well, the replacement parts for my laptop showed up, and maybe I didn't need them. The fan and heat sink were clogged with dust, and maybe I could have just cleaned them. But, having fresh parts meant I could just drop them in place instead of spending lots of time trying to get bits of very old, clingy dust out of a fan assembly. Plus - what if the fan was dying? I'd have to take the laptop apart again. So, yeah, fresh parts were good.

But then I realized I couldn't futz around in Sacred (a Diablo-like game that Pat and I have been playing) while watching a movie that I only have on the laptop; the Aspire won't play Sacred. This isn't horrible, but I've been leveling a new character to have for our higher level game. That's when I remembered that I have a Dell GX270 I bought as a Linux box. I hadn't booted it up in a long time because it always had trouble with its SATA drive, but didn't I have it's original IDE? Why, yes, I did. So I loaded a spare copy of Windows XP on it, and it plays Netflix streaming beautifully.

(Did I mention I bought a Sony Bravia 26" LCD TV with the money I received for Christmas? It has VGA input, you see. Low resolution given the screen size, but I think that's because it's intended to be used as a TV, not a monitor. Isn't that weird?)

But before I could watch TV, I had to set up some video conversions; I'm ripping my Buffy disks to MP4 files so that I can watch them on an iPod or Zune. So I did that on my main desktop.

Well, that's only four PCs for one person, and that's not *too* bad. (We'll ignore the old PC that's at Pat's place, or the laptop I gave to her, because that would make a total of 6, which is probably excessive. And besides, they're *hers* now.)