I have a pentium pro 333mhz and a pIII 933mhz setup as thin clients.

This kind of junk can be found easily and most of the times without any cost 🙂 The idea here is to have a typical client-server setup. I use SoThin for this and it does miracles for my kids! The server software is running on my home server (a mix of file server and media center right now). If you’re interested in this I recommend browsing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_client Another tip for cheap computer parts. The HDs! I bougth 4 250gb HDs, IDE, one samsung and the rest Western Digital, on eBay. After formating them I mounted a dynamic partition in a RAID like partition. 3 HDs as a single data unit with about 700gb and one for recovery if something happens. The price? A 3+1 RAID solution for 65 dollars? 🙂 Try to find one in the market!