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| 1. You should subscribe to Consumer Reports web site, it has reliability information on the manufacturers. But with age, usage and abusage, they all break down eventually, don't count on keeping a laptop more than 4-5 years, so don't get something pricey and upgrade to more recent hardware and maybe hardware when it's time, or the laptop would be too old and working on 3 legs to make it a useful donation to a kid or charity. Makes a great poisoned gift to the MIL though... ;)
Note that manufacturers have different ranges of Home and Business models that may have different kinds of reliability. This should be tempered by the fact that home users are usually not as cautious as business users, so even home models are kind of fool proof these days and it's not sure that the reliability of the business models is better than the home ones, but support is usually more responsive. Computers configured for a docking station are more expensive than regular laptops, but if you are moving the computer often, it is kind of mandatory, it is cheap for such convenience after all. After my external backup drives fail, I'll need to decide f I'll replace them just with a NAS box, which does amazing things these days, like acting as your personal cloud over the Internet, or with a NAS box and a small home server. For my own usage and sharing stuff with family and friends, I think it will be the latter.
2. If you keep only one computer, it should really be a laptop, so much more polyvalent. And they're quite powerful too. Mine is a Toshiba Satellite Pro Core i5 that has both a HDMI and a VGA connector, so you don't even need a second computer monitor, you can plug it via HDMI to any TV. The Media Center on my sister's TV can read movies straight from my laptop wirelessly, but I used the cable some times because some file types such as .mkv movies were not handled by the TV. So I was able to play the movie on my laptop and have the display go to the TV via the cable, no TV or box software required. The LCD panel on my laptop is not great (short angle of viewing), the type of LCD technology is something I'll look into more next time. Not many choices when it gets to a Windows 7 laptop though.
3. Can't help there, but there has been one recent post about it. At worst, if the signal does not go though, you can dig a cable to the buildings and have a cheap WiFi transceiver installed inside each building. (But the radio waves? They iz frying my brains!)
4. A Core i3 is all you need. A Core i5 would be more versatile, for instance for editing HD home videos, and may take you a year or two more without needing to upgrade. You don't seem to be using Windows Metro/Modern apps, so something like Windows 7 might suit you better, especially if you need to configure some software with the Windows XP compatibility more. Windows 8 is more recent, so you could get it too if you don't have software compatibility issues. I just can't get used to this mongrel of an operating system, I'll personally wait for Windows 10. I have already downloaded the Preview, still need to make a recent system disk image install it.
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Looking for a new computer and a couple other questions.
