I’ve discovered a great use for old laptop computers that are too slow to use for regular stuff: Digital Picture Frames. I spent about three months over the holiday season of 2007 making 4 digital picture frames. The first one was pretty rough and has a lot of unnecessary bulk. But the second generation turned out very nice. I built three of the second gen. frames and gave them out to my parents and inlaws for Christmas. The response was awesome.
I modified a Linux distribution called Centos to run the frames. Linux is both more stable than Windows and free. It’s also much easier to work with if you want to customize the entire O/S, which I had to do. I 
stripped down Centos so that it would run eficiently on old, slow hardware. I also wrote a whole slew of scripts that allow one to use the digital frame conveniently.
I created a small site for the project. But I let it die… So here is the content from it just in case anyone cares. :)
