What to do with my laptop
 

Ok, I was cleaning out an area of the shop I work in and found a cashe of laptops. I went through them trying to find out if any work and if they are usable. Well, out of all 3 I got one to turn on. Went straight to winxp setup and then froze. Put a xp pro disk in and it wouldn't boot to it. Took the CD out and saw why. A small laptop screw had fallen into the magnet that was on the DVD player next to the eye. Pulled it out, booted to setup fine and installed windows. Everything seems to check out fine (except the battery, it's dead). Boss said I could have it, seeing how it was abandoned here at the shop 3 years ago and he doesn't care for it.

Here is my question, what do I do with it? Two things popped in my head right away. First was of course, linux box. The other idea was hooking it up to my network at home and using the svideo out on the laptop to hook it to my TV. Then I can play anything I download on my TV at home.

Those things are easy to do and kinda boring.

What would you do with it?

Specs:
Dell Inspiron 600m
1.6ghz Centrino
512meg ram
40 gig HD
32 meg video
10/100 Ethernet
56K Modem (YEAH BABY!)
DVD burner
no wireless (got a USB wireless dongle tho)
dead battery (but I got the power adapter for it)

You could probably sell it for $150 if you needed the money.

I like the idea of hooking it up to your TV.
I would load it up with classic video games and pass it along to my 8-year-old nephew to keep him entertained.

Hook it up to your TV. Run XBMC or Boxee on it, linux or windows flavored.

Make a sweet digital picture frame!

If you have NetFlix, you can stream many movies online with it.

I'm in the same boat as you with an old laptop. I was thinking about looking into making it into a simple web server.