Network attached storage

I'm not sure why it's so hard to find a nice solution to storing all files we seem to accumulate. I have a laptop, its my primary personal machine. So when I use it, I can be anywhere in the house, if I'm in the house at all.

Over the years I've collected a lot of crap and I don't have room on my tiny laptop hard drive for all of it. Just the pictures I take alone would fill up the little drive in a matter of months. I mean, I shoot about a gig of pictures just about every time I pull the camera out of its bag and the drive on my laptop is only 40G. So it makes sense to keep the pictures somewhere else. I don't want to have to juggle CDs every time I needed a picture so I decided to put them on a USB drive. In fact I have several USB drives all of which I keep connected to a USB hub. When I want to use the drive, I plug the USB hub into my laptop, turn on the drive I want, and I'm up and running.

The problem is, it's inconvenient to connect the drives. I keep them near my desk. So if I want to use them, I need to use my laptop on my desk. I would much rather plug the drives into my network and access it from anywhere in the house. They make devices like this, called a NAS (networked attached storage) but they're expensive. Before I get one it has to fill a couple criteria.

• It has to cost less than $200.
• It has to support FAT-32 because I may also want to connect the drives directly to Linux machines, windows 98 machines, etc.
• It has to support WIFI, because I don't want to run a wire from the drives to the WIFI hub.
• It can't require specialized software on the client machine because it seems stupid to have to do so when there are already perfectly good ways of doing this. The more software I load the less stable my machine becomes and I would rather avoid that altogether. Also, it's unlikely they'd support Linux and windows 98. I want to access the drive using windows file sharing as if it were being shared by another windows machine.
• The device has to be energy efficient and quiet.

I could, I suppose, just plug these drives into another machine that I keep on all the time. I just think that's a messy way of doing it. I do in fact have an old laptop that I use for this purpose. I have some other drives and when I want to get to them I turn on the laptop and access the drives over the network. The problem is, it's an old, really slow laptop. I could replace it with a new PC but I don't want to have to pay $500 for a machine that I only use to share drives. Besides it wouldn't startup and shutdown nicely and it would suck up a bunch of electricity.

This NAS challenge actually ties into another one I have which is to find some way to make these files accessible through the TV so that people could flip through an album with a remote control. There are products out there available now. They're called PVR's (personal video recorders). The problem is that the popular devices, like TIVO, don't let you plug in extra USB drives. The more expensive PVR's that cost over $1000 are more flexible but too expensive. I suppose I'd be willing to throw down $400 - $500 for something that handled my network storage problem AND my PVR problem but I don't want to have to spend so much effort that I become an expert at it. I just want a clean simple solution.