How to waste your life, or, entertain yourself...

So I’m ripping my CD collection. I’m about a third of the way through, and I have over 6000 songs ripped already. I’m using Winamp to do the ripping… seems easy enough, and the searching and tagging features are pretty good. I’ve seen that there’s a similar-looking program for Linux called Rhythm Box… maybe I’ll try it someday, if I ever decide to change my desktop computer’s operating system from Windows Vista. I’m ripping the music to .flac files (that’s Free Lossless Audio Codec) because the .mp3 format steals the music’s soul, never to be heard from again. Of course, the resulting .flac files are a lot bigger than .mp3 files would be… but that’s ok. I just bought two 1TB hard drives! I think I’ll call them Terra One and Terra Two… I estimate that when I’m done the music will take up about 600GB. My music will be preserved for all time, and I can put it all on shuffle whenever I want! Not in my car, of course (yet)! Hmmm. Requirement: To be able to listen to any song in my car on demand. Solution: ? I wonder if one of my old laptops (say, my Dell Inspiron 1150) could be outfitted with a 750GB USB-powered hard drive (do those exist?), along with a mini-plug to cassette adapter, for some mobile music action… I believe more research is necessary in this area…