I did something similar but I had an extra LCD monitor laying around from upgrading (15 inch diag) and no spare laptop-- I bought a Kingwin Sound extreme multimedia player for $68 and installed a 20 gig 2.5" hard drive I had on hand in my computer junk box. Here's a bit on the Sound Extreme-- sweet little gadget http://www.cluboverclocker.com/reviews/multimedia/Kingwin_Sound_Xtream/Index.htm ) The sound extreme has a remote and is only 5" X 3.5" X 1" and it nestled in a contour on the back of the monitor inside a wood shadow box picture frame very nicely-- the only mod I did was to extend the IR receiver for the remote to the front of the unit-- I cut out a small hole in the backing so that the Sound Extreme cables could be accessed for uploading and deleting items on the hard drive. It plays photo slide shows, movies, music-- sweet little gadget. I also made an abandoned pocket PC into a nice little digital frame simply by cutting the correct sized matting and attaching the PDA to the back of the frame with rubber straps.