Thanks for the input! I had briefly looked into some of the Toshibas, Winbooks, Gateways, Sony, and IBM's.

I really liked the option of having two optical drives one cd, other cdrw so I could burn on it w/o hooking up an external drive. It seems as this options is tough to find.

Many also only had USB based replicators with a minimum of ports and options (I will need serial ... I know it's old, but it's how the RainForest Cam connects).

I'll dig some more and let y'all know what I end up doing