My apologise Bill, I should have re-read my post and checked my figures. The $3200 that was in my mind was the initial price I had worked out for my 8" a month ago when I sold it. The correct price for a new 8" is around $4200. I should have checked. I can only blame inattention, late nights and being destracted by Bangladesh giving the Aussie bowlers a caning in their last five overs in bat. Sorry for getting you hopeful.
I can tell you that the 8" Meade OTA is available for $1599 (I'm looking at the email I received when I ordered my new OTA. Checking again. Yes $1599), but are usually ordered from the states as a special shipment by the Aus companies. Which leaves you with $2900 for a good mount, mounting rails and accessories. You can also get the Celestron OTAs as well but these are generally realdily available not requiring special ordering from the states. On of our members recently went through the process of price comparing 10, 11, and 12" OTAs so hopefully he'll pop in with some prices
Not sure how you will go getting views from your eyepiece to the laptop that are good enough for viewing. For the moon and planets and bright objects NP using something like a ToUcam, but DSOs, I'm not sure how successful you would be trying that. We're talking about really low light levels here. Multiple long exposure images are stacked to achieve a single image for photography, I'm not sure if there is equipment light sensitive enough to try to do what you want. There are electronic eyepieces as well, but again I've heard they are only useful on brighter objects.