"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...

I meant could the USB to IEEE-488 interfaces be talked to with
something other than Windows systems. I actually have a PCI
IEEE-488
board in one linux box, but I would like to also have some IEEE-488
communications from my Sun Blade 2000 systems.

Second-hand office PCs with XP still installed or freshly reloaded are
cheap (or free) and work fine without updates or antivirus as lab
instrument controllers. I recently paid $25 for a fully functional
wide-screen, dual core laptop with XP which I turned into an HDTV
recorder.

Being the standard, everything is available for them without the fuss
of adding hardware to a Mac or unix system. Check the number and type
of expansion slots since they may not have as many, especially PCI-E,
as a home machine. You can back up or clone the operating system
partition and not worry about reinstalling it.

My 1999-vintage 400 MHz datalogging laptop runs Windows 2000, with
Internet Explorer 6 and Adobe 7 to read documentation and OpenOffice
2.0 to crunch the data. The COM and USB port expanders plug into the
CardBus slot. I still use it because it's no big loss if I snag a
cable and it falls and breaks. It's an example of the minimum that's
still useful.

-jsw