New setup advice please

[zorrofox]

Hello everyone. It's been a while since I last posted here and I have to say I'm a bit out of the loop these days.

Here's my situation. I currently have a desktop PC with quad-core CPU and all the fancy stuff. I originally bought this for gaming but I've since bought a PS3 and now do all my gaming on that. The one thing I still do use my PC for is internet and email (obviously) and as a glorified jukebox. I currently have four hard drives totalling 3TB and all drives are pretty much filled with music, mostly encoded in FLAC. With this in mind I've been thinking of downscaling to a laptop or netbook. The portability of a netbook really appeals to me and the battery life on some certainly seems impressive (up to 6 hours).

Is there any way I could buy a netbook for under £300 which would allow me to hook up external hard drives so as to allow me to run it as a jukebox. The audio would be being output to a Rotel stereo amplifier in the short term but we're moving house soon - to a dial-up location, lol - and once moved I'll be installing an AV amp and surround speaker setup.

I've been doing some research on this but to be honest I'm just not sure how I'd go about hooking it all up. I'm going to have to hang on to the desktop PC as I do a lot of photo editing but the new house will have enough space for me to build a studio and I envisage the desktop PC living there. The only software I'll be running on the netbook will be Firefox, Thunderbird & Foobar so I'm thinking of trying Linux for the OS.

If anyone could shed any light on what my options are I'd be very grateful for the input.

Thanks in advance,
Gordon

 

[malcolm]

I suspect your hard drives total a bit more than 3 GBytes.......3Tbytes perhaps?

All netbooks tend to have 3 USB ports and not much else to hang hard drives on to. You could always convert your HD's to NAS devices with the right enclosure. Or just leave them where they are and use your main PC as a server.

I found the screen and keyboard of my Netbook just too limiting to use it for anything really serious at home. Not that it was unuseable, just that a 15" laptop was so much easier to work on. They are fine if you are on the road and need something really portable, but I always seemed to need a lot more screen area.

 

[zorrofox]

Hi Malcom. Well spotted on the typo, my mistake. I think you might have a good idea there in the server suggestion. I'm not too sure how I'd go about that but it sounds good as I'll have to hang on to this machine anyway for editing. No idea about NAS. I already have a dual-core Fujitsu 15" laptop too but I've never really got on with it. It runs Vista and to be honest I hate it. Maybe I should try installing Linux on that?

Thanks for the feedback. Anyone got any other suggestions?

Gordon.