Re: Laptop for music only

bencejohn@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
A question for those who have made a computer a central component of
their home stereos.

Listening more and more as I do to mp3s (and other such formats), I'm
going to introduce a laptop plus external hard drive into my stereo
system. I see I can get an external drive with 500 gigs of storage
for under $150 (e.g. Lacie) now. That should be more than sufficient,
I would think, especially since I don't mind lossy formats, but one
can always add more drives.

My requirements for such a dedicated laptop (used or new) are modest:

The machine should be simply powerful enough to accommodate the
following:

An internet connection (for CDDB access only)
A media player (of course), e.g. realplayer
Cygwin (I like to use it to manage my files)
WinXP (installed)
Mounting the external drive
CD burning s/w

Also:

Storage space is not that important except for swap
The screen need not be particularly large
USB 2.0 (possibly, see below)
An internal CDR

Typical use would be running the media player, Cygwin, and the net
connection, with the external drive always mounted.

Keep in mind I plan to use this machine for *nothing* else but playing
music files.

My two question:

I'd like to spend no more than $150 for such a machine (that seems
possible fishing around the web). Which source should I go to (plus
an example machine, if possible)?

Also, the only stumbling block to the low price is possibly USB 2.0,
which, as a relatively new standard, is offered only on newer
machines. I don't need the rate of transfer to be high (I can drag a
bunch of data over before bed). If I get a USB 2.0 drive, would it be
backwards-compatible with USB 1.0?

Yes, but the performance would be dreadful. USB 2.0 has been around 6 years - I wouldn't consider that relatively new (in the PC world).

How are you going to play the music files? Via internal speakers? Via headphones connected to (potentially noisy) internal headphone amp? The best ways would be to output digitally via S/PDIF to a stereo system, or headphones with a quality audio interface. (I used to use an Echo Indigo PCMCIA card which had 2 headphone jacks and volume control when I had a Windows laptop).

Steve
.

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