I have a friend with a new Nexus 5, latest stock Lollipop, struggling with visual impairment. Black text on white backgrounds really are hard on his eyes. I know we can do a global reverse colors, but that just messes up all the colors.
Is there a way to get a "white on black" theme or will...
Well if you're comparing SATA Revision 3.0 (6 Gbps) to eSATA (3 Gbps), then yea... but most hard disks don't even saturate SATA 1.5 Gbps. Expect eSATA 6 Gbps products soon with the SATA 3.1 spec
Since you have a few hard drives already, have you considered Windows Home Server?
Take an old desktop and install WHS. It can manage all your drives in one storage pool, can handle incremental backups of up to 10 Windows clients, can do a bare-metal restore from the network.
It's the best...
Does it have a docking station? Could turn it on through a power switch there
Also, if it's attached to an Ethernet cord, you could use Wake-on-Lan packet to wake it from sleep
1) Xp to 7 - yes (I doubt 2000 to 7)
2) Sure, you can reinstall Win 7 over itself. Of course you need to reactivate
3) Yes
See: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/help/upgrading-from-windows-xp-to-windows-7
PHP + Ajax is a winning combination. There are tons of tutorials out there, you just have to find the right project to work on. Perhaps you should find some open-source project to contribute to, that way you can build your skills first
Since Powerpack 1, WHS will always use the system drive last for storage. So it's safe. Even if its writing a lot of tombstones, the tombstones just point to the data disks where it's really stored.
I'm not saying its supported (heck, a lot of what you can do isn't per EULA), but it's possible...