[E3-hacking] Newbie E3 owner

[lists at mice-software.com]

Hi,

I recently bought a couple of E3s from eBay (£25 each exc. shipping,  
sadly I've had no luck finding brand new ones for £10 or whatever).  
One of them was clearly new and has v4.9, however the other turned out  
to have been used (looks new and still has stickers, but some parts of  
the packaging are missing and it has some woman's name in it, with PBL  
v5.1. And some phone book entries, although I can't find them in  
Amstrad's GUI...

Anyway, I obviously bought both to play with, so I had a few ideas:

1) to set one up with a wired ethernet USB adapter and a hard disk  
(via a USB hub?), my plan being to make one of them into a small  
file/subversion server that's less power hungry than a Dell PowerEdge  
or whatever.

2) to set one up in the kitchen as a mini internet terminal, allowing  
people to look up e-mails/recipes, edit the shopping list, etc. via a  
wifi dongle

3) use the modem in one as a PBX endpoint to the public telephone  
system (allowing me to set up Asterisk/etc. on another machine),  
whilst having it work as a VoIP unit

4) Videoconferencing between other systems :)

Anyway, has anyone tried any of these? I've had a look round the wiki  
and the past e-mails here but it's not really clear what the present  
state of drivers/etc. are - I don't mind working on drivers either  
(although my experience with drivers is primarily on OSX and a small  
amount on Windows)

Finally, is there anything I can do with the v5.1 unit, or should I  
just send it back to the person I bought it from? I was wondering if  
anybody had succeeded persuading it to talk (by the looks of here and  
the wiki, no), or if anyone had tried anything more hardcore - I had  
the notion of trying to do something like putting the CPU into a  
hi-impedence state and attempting to write the Flash in-situ from an  
external device, or capturing the contents of the Flash as the system  
starts using an FPGA and attempting to reverse engineer it. Or is  
there something simpler like a JTAG connector?

Thanks,
Colin