What is Man?

I had an old Thinkpad 570 laptop in the closet, 366Mghz, 192 megabytes of ram, 6 gig hard disk, Windows 2000. It has a dock, but without it, it’s got 1 usb 1.0 port and no optical drive. The 5000 series was at one time a line of premium ultra-portables with a sterling reputation, and some people still use them with Linux. This one does have a pretty glaring flaw… if I pick it up by the corner and it flexes, it blue screens.  I know what the problem is, it’s a break in the hard disk connecter. It won’t do it if the hard drive isn’t in, and it does it with any hard disk. The other problem is the the battery lasts about 8 minutes.

I tried to put Linux on it at one point but it was really flaky, even though I tried three different distro’s. I never even got it to boot reliably.

So I found a good use for it, one that doesn’t require handling.

I use it as an audio bridge for the sound system.

I have an older Logitech Z-680 surround sound system hooked up to the DVD player in the living room, it sounds great and I love to listen to it. I wanted to be able to play music from my laptop over it, because it can convert stereo into something that sounds like surround sound. My only way to do this was to run a cable from my laptop to the control box’s analog input. That was cumbersome, so this is what I did:

I took the Thinkpad and got it on the wireless network with a 20 dollar Trendnet wireless PCMCIA card from Newegg. After I got it going (no hang-ups there), I downloaded and installed Winamp 5.5 and UltraVNC. I use Winamp as my music library and UltraVNC allows me to remotely control the Thinkpad’s desktop from another PC. Both programs are free. The newest version of VNC (1.0.5) gave me some problems on Vista, so I used 1.0.2 and it works fine. This is what it looks like from my tablet laptop:

The window in the center is the Thinkpad’s desktop, which is running Winamp at full screen. I set up an icon with the VNC username and password on my desktop so all I have to do is click the icon and I get a connection.

Here’s the setup:

The cable going into the left of the laptop is the USB connector for the external hard drive. On the right top is the green audio connector that goes from the headphone jack to the surround sound control pod. You can see the wireless card sticking out on the right, too. On the far right of the picture is an external 100 gig hard drive and the Z-680 control pod. All this except for the pod goes behind the gas fireplace and next to the subwoofer.

This is what it looks like from the couch:

Only the control pod is visible. It’s remote controlled, so I can switch between digital and analog inputs and control volume, though I usually use Winamp’s volume for that.

Here’s a (blurry)  picture of me using it on the tablet, no wires attached:

So far, so good. It’s turned out to be even cooler than I thought, because created a share on the external drive and I now I back up files to it across the network.