i have a pentium 1 laptop (100mhz, 32mb ram i believe) that I was able to run DSL on and NetBSD. I tried installing debian but it ran for 3 days grabbing packages so i finally just killed the install.

i still use my original xbox as my media box with XBMC. The main downside is the slow processor which limits what can be decoded, but there is a pretty good HOWTO in the wiki for tailoring the settings of h.264+ac3 for output on the xbox.

I have a Brother MFC-7840W and can confirm that Brother has great OS X, Linux, and Windows support. My OKI C8800 also works very well on all three, but isn't quite a consumer model printer. So, I wouldn't discount OKI right away either.

i have ATT and live in PA with a MD number. I only pay PA tax on my line.

Apart from not bringing the laptop to class, how about you don't take it out during class? If people don't see it, they won't know it's there and they won't ask to use it. I'd bet they are already trained on asking you so they'll ask you for a few weeks even if they don't see it, but keep saying "sorry i didn't bring it" and soon they'll learn to rely on other resources.

I wrote an overclocking buyers guide and I have been updating it relatively frequently over the last few years. it hasn't been updated in a few months tho as my work has started taking up more of my time. but, it too could also be seen as a gaming guide http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=483065

It's funny that people don't think of this, or don't want to do this. I was sent to Europe for a two week engineering conference and took an extra weekend to explore a little on my own. Out of the 7 americans on the trip, only one other did the same thing.

We had another engineering conference in Colorado and I was amazed that only two other people wanted to go out early and hit the slopes. The company payed the airfare so all I had to do was pay the extra nights stay and lift tickets...total no brainer to me. I'm sure everyone has their reasons one way or the other, but opportunities like these don't pop up everyday so it's hard for me to understand why everyone doesn't make the most out of them.

...Insanity later.

sure, but if you are compressing the stream to mp3/ogg/etc and listening over standard headphones then most people wouldn't notice the difference. If you want to use digital spdif to connect and then encode in flac or other loss-less, that is an option too. There are many different avenues with the same result.