Mark W.
Nut house of the Universe
OK I have a Compac laptop that when my son joined the NAVY he bought to soon (not up to his needs) and when the HD crapped he left it here. I managed to reserect for a few months before the HD took a perminate dive.
With Laptop HD's dropping in price I'm thinking of putting in a new 30-40Gig HD and using it as a Music server and DATA type CD player for my system. It has built in sound but I would like to greatly upgrade that if possible.
My son who is an ET in NAVY suggested I get a USB-2 type expantion card for it then pickup some type of USB connectable Sound card (hopefully with RCA's)
I need to know what to look for along those lines if anyone has any experiance.
It currently has a Combo drive that plays DVD's (or at least it's supposed to but never would for me (may have been an issue with the junk HD) and will burn CD's. SO the next thing I would need to do with it is get the DVD player to work (I sure it is a software issue) For what a new Combo drive costs if software for this one cost much I would rather replace the drive and start over.
I assume that I can just use the current AC adapter to power it while it's playing jukebox so that part is covered. I will need to figure out a better way to power it in a car then the battery alone as the wife is getting interested in Geochaching with her little Garmin GPS so having a portable laptop would be nice with maps and the GPS interfaced into it. I assume one of the little 300-400 watt inverters that plug into a cigg lighter would do the trick.
SO any help, suggestions, or corrections???
With Laptop HD's dropping in price I'm thinking of putting in a new 30-40Gig HD and using it as a Music server and DATA type CD player for my system. It has built in sound but I would like to greatly upgrade that if possible.
My son who is an ET in NAVY suggested I get a USB-2 type expantion card for it then pickup some type of USB connectable Sound card (hopefully with RCA's)
I need to know what to look for along those lines if anyone has any experiance.
It currently has a Combo drive that plays DVD's (or at least it's supposed to but never would for me (may have been an issue with the junk HD) and will burn CD's. SO the next thing I would need to do with it is get the DVD player to work (I sure it is a software issue) For what a new Combo drive costs if software for this one cost much I would rather replace the drive and start over.
I assume that I can just use the current AC adapter to power it while it's playing jukebox so that part is covered. I will need to figure out a better way to power it in a car then the battery alone as the wife is getting interested in Geochaching with her little Garmin GPS so having a portable laptop would be nice with maps and the GPS interfaced into it. I assume one of the little 300-400 watt inverters that plug into a cigg lighter would do the trick.
SO any help, suggestions, or corrections???