This morning I was cruising the net reading the news and had some music from musicmatch radio service playing on the speakers. My wife comes down from sleeping-in and bust my chops and gets real sarcastic about how the music selection is awesome in the office but the multi-thousand dollar entertainment system hasn’t had a CD stuck in it for a couple of years. hardly She then puts me to task to fixing that.
Well I have quite honestly been putting off building my own computerized entertainment system. I had a laptop in the closet that was collecting dust and went to dig it out. Fear set in when I ran it up and Windows ME slapped me in the face after applying the patches and paying for a virus checker update I got busy. After a couple of hours of removing all of the crap from it including installing a older copy of PCAnywhere and getting a WiFi card loaded that works with ME. I was all set to start installing programs that I would use to transform this older laptop into a media distribution system.
After much experimentation and loading a half a dozen programs and finding a place to hide the thing wiring it in I was happy to see a good WiFi signal I was all set. I have it playing music from the mapped drive on the server and streaming audio with hotlinks to all of my favorite radio station in the mainland. I have even played some home videos that I had digitized on the server. All the while the video and audio from it is piped around the house thru the home entertainment system. The WiFi WAP is getting a heavy workout but that’s what technology is all about.
The wife who is not a techie is pretty happy and I had fun doing it. Who said older hardware is only good at collecting dust.