On Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:06:47 -0500, Tony wrote:
For the last 4 or 5 years I've been using a scrapped mother board. Wish
I could get my hands on newer ones more often.

Depends where you are, but your local freecycle list might be worth a try.
There's nothing on the one where I am now, but where I used to live it
was full of PCs that were only a couple of years old; there were a lot of
tech companies in that area and they used to upgrade really often and
didn't know what to do with the stuff they got rid of.

I think my personal favourite was an old audio card I had (back in the
days where you never saw a motherboard with audio built-in) - it had
belonged to a friend and fell partway out of the motherboard slot and
shorted out against the case, burning out quite a few of the PCB tracks
before the machine's PSU gave out. Amazingly it didn't kill any of the ICs
though, so after rewiring around the damage it was up and running again...
I think it cost me a beer, and audio cards were expensive back then.

Poor college kids like them just as a word processor. Ha, remember
them? Word processors?

I suspect you mean those little typewriter-like things, but I had an old
Diamond D5 from the late '70s - box about 16"x24"x36" with twin 8" floppy
drives, a monitor that wasn't much smaller, and a big ol' daisywheel
printer. It was a real beast :-)

cheers

Jules