Wayne Chirnside wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:

RJT> There are fewer and fewer slots all the time,  it seems,  particularly
RJT> when you have a MB with lots of "stuff" on it.  And as
far as disabling
RJT> it goes,  that may or may not always work.  

WC> Saw a Gigabyte board on the net with every imaginable port and it 
WC> had either 5 or six available slots, supported _4_ Gig of RAM and I 
WC> believe a 4 Gig intel processor!!!

Only one?  :-)

WC> These are shop or home built computers and not something you'll 
WC> find at a retail outlet.

Depends on the retail store,  I try to find some fairly odd places.

WC> This board with processor IS available at www.pricewatch.com NOW in 
WC> bare bones configuration and you add the goodies as your desire or 
WC> compulsion dictates. SCSI and EIDE support as well also on the 
WC> board.

Cool.  I remember looking at one MB a few years back which could hold two
CPUs,  and in addition to the usual stuff had _three_ SCSI channels on
board,  including one wide one.  Only problem I had with it was that it
wanted P-II (or Celeron) type CPUs,  and I didn't care to pursue those, 
preferring AMD parts for the most part.  This was available for $75 or so, 
back about 3 years ago.

RJT> I can still remember a few years back how this guy I knew had a 
RJT> 386 MB that had a bad problem in the IDE part.  He could disable 
RJT> it in CMOS,  but it still wouldn't let him plug in another "paddle 
RJT> card" to use instead.  That MB was of _very_ limited usefulness 
RJT> after that.  If you can't take it out...

WC> I suspect an EideMax  or Pro card would have worked fine there as
WC> in stock configuration it takes over from the existing controller. 

But the existing controller was bad,  and wouldn't let anything else work
in there.  I dunno...  That incident sorta put me off on having lots and
lots of stuff built in.

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