That mess of wires under the TV

I'm frugal (which sounds nicer than "cheap"). My laptop is a refurbished Chromebook I got from US Walmart for $350. It's not bad at all -- runs Linux, 4GB RAM, decent processor and turns out the 16GB SSD hasn't been a limit so far. But it's a Yugo, all right; sound is fussy, the screen is small (which I haven't valued as much as I thought I would), and the trackpad is for shit. But it was cheap!

My former laptop was a monster of a Dell; it had been my wife's before the wireless crapped out and we (sort of) upgraded her. I stuck in a USB wireless stick that mostly works, and went with that 'til the monitor started flashing angry red unless you tilted it just right. Now it belongs to the kids, and they use it to send email and play Minecraft.

And the laptop before that? Refurbished Dell (there's a pattern here) I bought off eBay for the 12" screen. It's a P3 (remember those?) with 500 MB of RAM. The battery doesn't work any more, of course, but it still serves my website, catches my mail and runs Emacs & Mutt. And until today, it held music and backups too, on an external hard drive my dad sent me long ago: an old 500 GB PATA drive in a Ferrari case that came from his town library. It died today, but I had been in the habit of rsyncing it to a couple other external drives (newer vintage), plus the kids' laptop, so it was easy enough to recover things.

It turns out it was a good match for this old laptop: 500GB is small enough that it didn't strain its tiny little brain trying to count too high. Hooking up the 3 TB hard drive just caused all sorts of problems. I might have a smaller hard drive that'll work...but of course, the laptop was old when I bought it in 2007. The one USB port on it is 1.0, for heaven's sake. It's amazing that it's kept running this long.

So what now? I'm not sure. I hate dealing with hardware anymore -- who has the time? -- but I also don't want to host my website & mail externally. I also still need some kinda server to play music and such. I want something silent, Linux/BSD compatible, already assembled, and durable -- I don't want to do this again for another 5 years. And did I mention I'm cheap^Wfrugal?

Intel NUC might be an idea. I've got a Raspberry Pi that has been nothing but trouble because of USB problems; ditto a PogoPlug before that. I love the idea of low-power boxen, but they're turning out to be a PITA. I could go to the local FreeGeek and try another laptop -- $100 would probably get me something decent and considerably more recent.

Sigh, dunno...snappy conclusion goes here.