Shame there fanless tablet PC's where underrated for late night browsing / reading but a little on the pricey side but with excellent battery life, need a laptop to last 16+ hrs on a flight.
Real reason they faded from existence is drivers and support. If i wanted to deploy 1000+ Win 7 laptops i could use dell or HP tools in Microsoft SCCM to automatically create custom images, bios settings and driver packs for any given business model, but for Toshiba i had to individually download drivers for each model or email and request a driver pack. With Win 10 this is easier but still so much simpler with Dell / HP.

Spare parts were also a issue need 10+ screens for dropped student classroom laptops that needed a week long email chain to get a custom quote, so i resorted to ebay and had them fixed in 48 hrs not much cheaper but so much quicker than dealing with toshiba. I also got quoted £13 ($17) for a set of screws for 1 laptop(18 screws) when i can get the same screws by the 100 for £3 ($5). A real shame after they clearly went to effort to have there laptops serviceable by design.

even so i did prefer the build quality and still use a toshiba myself to this day

"We'd love it if the file-system could detect this and try correcting first, and if it couldn't correct the problem, it could trigger the restoration. But that only seems to be an option for RAID type systems, where the drives are colocated."

If you have ~2TB of irreplaceable memories set up a NAS with a RAID array. whilst bit-rot can be detected it can only correct itself if the file system knows what the bits should have been. To this end BTRFS and my recommendation ZFS can be set to say scan all data 1 a week/month etc and using the redundant data in the RAID array correct the 'Bit-Rot'.

I have a intel atom board in a old case with 4 drives(2x 500GB mirror and 2x 1TB mirror). I have FREENAS on this it is powered on every night by wake on lan. Backs up any new data and gets shut down. once a week it backs up new data then runs the command 'zfs scrub' this checks for bit-rot or inconsistencies in the file-system and corrects them if any are found.(can email you a warning if you want as well). This way if any files get damaged on a home pc/ laptop etc.. any user can turn on the NAS and recover there files from the shared folder.

1 point of warning ZFS is RAM hungry so 4GB is the minimum. something to keep in mind when ebaying for a old pc to use. others will also point out that file transfers are ~20-30MB/s with a low powered atom so use something with more grunt if its to be a 24/7 NAS.

Whilst not necessary cost effective as a demo for our IT department we hid a 'Geogram One' arduino device in a laptop. runs off usb power so works whenever the theft powers on the laptop. GPS antenna is hidden in the screen you can get the location by sending a 'Text Message' to the device and it responds with the co-ordinates.

1. laptop stolen
2. IT department sends sms/textmesage with password and instruction to hidden device
3. when laptop is next powered on it starts periodically sending sms messages with location to within 2-4m in our tests.
4. ring cops with location.

will survive any hard drive swap or format and with the corect epoxy if they find it they will atleast brick the laptop in the process as it takes the smd components with it.

downside is time to install and price. also ultrabooks have little space to hide it but any larger laptop you can often find a spot.

CPU's tends not to be the bottle neck these days its either the hard drive or slow internet connection. At work I priced up some AMD classroom PC's and in bulk we could have given each pc a 128GB SSD(all user work kept on a SAN and system image is about 60-80GB once MSI's have been deployed) with the savings of going AMD but as the boss had never used AMD and reviews keep going on about how intel is faster he went for a mix of I5 and I7 intel based pc's with little ram so as to keep the cost down and as a result startup times are no better than the old intel core duo pc's they replaced. To top it off the boss now has my demo AMD setup as 'its the fastest PC' admittedly that’s only due to a SSD not the CPU but I do get his I7. How do I find a excuse to put a large RAID of SSD's in it?

Asus rt-n16 with dd-wrt has been very stable for me and is probably the closet you will get to a business grade router without spending business router money. At work i installed a draytek 2830 as they needed the features of dd-wrt but where unwilling to lose the warranty.