see Amdahl's law for more about speedup gain for any one part of a problem.

I think step one is to pick a storage/naming convention and stick with it. Also depending on your needs a document management system could help. The other thing I would do is look and figure out where the bottleneck is for your speed issue, is it the vpn connection, the network not being able to keep up, or the computer running samba. Once you know more of where the slowdown is work on that spot.

I currently face the wall, but that is just because I am to lazy to scavenge up a power cord that is longer to go anywhere else.
Also since my office is in the basement, there is no fancy amenities like a window to look out of.

There are plenty of free alternatives out there, I personally prefer AVG. Here is an article laying the free options out for you.

but how many people can it support on a tower at a time before it slows to a crawl?

true... but the fact is that a great deal of our electricity is produced by coal power... we should go to Nuclear or other cleaner power but that is not going to happen tomorrow. CFLs have always been more of a stopgap then anything else. Also the CFL mercury release is only if you break it... with a bit of care that rarely happens.

they didn't loose, they are just bideng their time till they can rise up again!

as you are at a University, you probably have access to a copy of Adobe Accrobat, I have found that it has an alright OCR for scanned pdfs. Also you may want to look at using Scribd it is not open source but is free and searchable.

Here is another aspect of the impact of CFLs compared to incandescent bulbs... per an EPA fact sheet, even if your CFL breaks the amount of Mercury released into the environment is less then the amount released by a regular bulb and a coal power plant. If you do break your CFL, there are steps that you need to take to get it cleaned up. Snopes has some good tips on how to do that

I don't think it will make it, but it is good for background noise. Then again, I don't watch it on tv, I watch it on Hulu when I want...

The problem with that is if you are a different ISP there is no guarantee that your traffic will stay local. To connect with a server that I know is in the same town takes 17 hops via traceroute and based on host names bounces from Iowa (local) to Chicago to Denver to Kansas City to Iowa

dam it can't we all just get along?