I'm not wasting any more time chasing your moving goal posts. I could point out that you can pretty easily find cheap, working computers on Craigslist, and frequently for well under $100, but then you'd quail that those aren't new. You've clearly made an ideological commitment to this position. Who would I be to unmoor you?

OK, fine; I'll concede that point. But let's remember the inflation that's occurred since the time around my birth: $200 in 1980 would be just over $600 now. Even if we knock 20% off the effective buying power of that money, $500 in 2014 will buy a computer that's 100% ready to connect to a television and run an overwhelming majority of applications, including Visual Studio Express.

So look on Amazon for a Raspberry Pi kit, with case, (micro)SD card, and a few other various & sundries. Once it's arrived in the mail, put it together, sit down with the kids, and figure out how to shoehorn an OS onto the thing. I can't imagine setting up and effectively using a ZX Spectrum would be easier than a Raspberry Pi or Banana Pi.

In my experience one doesn't regularly spend hours in an enclosed, pressurized space thousands of feet above ground with fast food workers...

What a way to view the people in your world - as an endless series of economic actors to whom you feel superior or against whom you rationalize your lower standing. I hope I never work for you.

As you board the plane. It's always greeted with a little surprise, but they're always grateful.

Seriously - bring a package of cookies for the flight crew. The flight attendants will leave you alone except to check on you, and will probably sneak you a non-alcoholic treat at some point during the flight. And it's not a job that's appreciated terribly much - look at the comments in this thread, just for starters - so it goes a long way.

It's even weirder than that. For reference:

.mp1 = MPEG-1 Layer 1 Audio, used by no one and basically a historical footnote

.mp2 = MPEG-1 Layer 2 Audio, used by the radio broadcast industry for archival above 224 kbps and the audio format of VideoCDs

.mp3 = MPEG-1 Layer 3 Audio, the most familiar and widely used consumer audio format in the world

.mp4 = Advanced Audio Codec, AKA MPEG-2 Layer 7 Audio, later updated to MPEG-4 Layer 3 Audio

And that concludes today's installment of worthless trivia.

I think it was around 5 or 6 gigs, which isn't atypical these days. If that's alarming, don't look up the specs for Wolfenstein: The New Order. You'll crack.

Seconded - I've tried it on Xubuntu 14.04 x64, on an AMD FX-8320 with 24 gigs DDR3-1600 and a Geforce GTX 660 running recent proprietary drivers, and all is running beautifully. It looks like Aspyr's pulled off a lovely, polished port. Yay!

Any luck with virtualization? I know you can "lock" various ports for VM-only access, and that might simplify administration in some ways (i.e., if something happens to the install, roll back to a working snapshot, use a shared directory to output any work from the VM without directly exposing it to the network &c.).

Eww. Apologies, I misunderstood the main issue.

A 2.5" drive is a 2.5" drive, be it SSD or conventional/platter-based. I don't guarantee this is the specific revision of your laptop(s), but upgrading doesn't look hard, and you'd have a mountain of storage space and a reasonable upgrade path. Now if you're running something that uses HDA modules like a Macbook Air does, that's a valid point. But I don't think the eeePCs ever did.

I'm an old timer, and have been around so long that I want to be sure of something. When you say PII, do you mean Pentium II or Phenom II? I've seen that used for both.

I'd switch to x264 in an MKV container - you can get the same quality in about 3/4ths the file size without even being clever.