Laptop or old pavilion

[Neuromancer]

I am going to setup a PC in the bedroom for watching my Xfiles/Stargate episodes while I drift off to lala land and have to choices.


Run laptop with external speakers and 19" crt external monitor. Use wifi to stream video from FREE NAS. This will also mean setting up PC 2 as a free nas box.

Alternative is too install a Nix flavor like... geexbox (have to check requirements) on the 2nd PC and leave laptop out of the loop.

2nd PC is a Pavilion 6353 upgrade. 466 Celerey 256mb pc100 8 mb onboard, some kind of on board audio.

is 8mb of onboard video memory enough to display full screen video? Is is resolution dependent? Like if I force 640x480 resolution would it be capable?

I would rather NOT use the laptop as my 2nd htpc, but will if I have too.

[Pinky]

I think 8MB will run resolutions up to 1024 with ease, maybe higher, at 32bit. I'm not 100%, just what I can recall after touching a few thousand older PCs in the past 6 years...

I couldn't give you much advice about the rest though. Think those are linux apps, right? I'm linux impaired (maybe not for long with Vista looking like a steaming pile...)...

[Neuromancer]

Sweet I will try it out this weekend :) Just woke up from my napp backing up 400+GB of data so ready to raid my perp drives now in the new rig :) and copy it all back :(