2nd life for a Laptop

No, this has nothing to do with Second Life, the online phenomena and everything to do with re-purposing an old piece of hardware.

I am currently working on several projects that involve team members that work in different parts of the county. I work out of my home office in Atascadero but I spend quite a bit of time meeting with clients and colleagues in the SLO and AG areas. A lot of meetings are held at coffee shops, the home-office worker’s conference room. Silly me, the last time I bought a new computer I put together a rockin’ work station rather than buying myself a laptop. At the time I didn’t really need to travel or work away from my office and opted for the high powered server.

So here I am today in need of a laptop but I don’t want to plunk down any amount of money right now. However I have an old 3rd or 4th hand Dell Inspiron 7500 PentiumIII. Last year I reformatted the hard drive and loaded Windows XP on it – originally it came with WindowsNT or Windows98. I loaded XP because I needed to run a demo application for sales calls and it was all I had. XP loaded and I got it up and running no problem. But I had no apps on it and it ran the demo app very sluggishly.

The laptop sat on a shelf for over a year. It was not quite at door stop status but it was getting close. However I have always advocated that with the advent of web apps and remote admin software any old PC or laptop that can run a current version of a web browser still has life as long as the hard drive holds out. Now I have an opportunity to heed my own advocacy and I am going to resurrect the Inspiron 7500 to help me be mobile as I work on my various projects and spend little or no money in the process.

I followed Roberto Monge’s lead and set up one of my projects on BaseCamphq.com. BaseCamp is a web based project management tool. I am testing out the free version that allows you to work on one project. I am setting up the URL for the project on Google’s business apps and will run my spreadsheet and documents through there along with setting up Gmail on my domain.

Next I loaded Skype on the laptop and plugged my VoIP headset in and made a high quality call without a hitch. Finally I loaded Radmin Viewer on the laptop and set up Radmin server on my PC. Now through the web browser on the laptop I can run any app and access any data on my home server.

Other than the cost of the Radmin Viewer license (which I already had) it took no money for me to turn a rather old laptop into a very usable machine by limiting the software on it to the OS, Internet Explorer, Skype, and Radmin.

With this configuration I can almost divorce myself of a piece of hardware whether it be a PC or laptop. If all my apps and data are online, then all I need is access to machine with a web browser and I have all my tools and resources at my disposal – as long as I have an Internet connection.