Yup, the fan was just plug-n-play on that motherboard. My RFM has a different motherboard, and I don't recall seeing a 3-pin fan connector on it.

Hey, I just noticed that the motherboard in my SWE1 has a 3-pin fan connector. I'll give that a shot when my new cooler shows up.

Getting the heatsink clamped on can be a bit of a challenge... I suggest you take the computer box completely out of the machine and set it down on a table to work on it. And the fan comes with a 3-pin connector, which you'll likely hack off since you'll probably be hooking it up to just two pins (+...

This one has worked great in my RFM: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835150010 $12.99, with free shipping. It's pretty big (which is good), but you may have trouble getting it to fit on some motherboards. I ordered another one for the SWE1 I just bought the other night. Matt

A cheapo CF card is probably not going to do adequate wear-leveling. You need to go with a good brand-name card. It really all depends on how much writing you end up doing (I assumed it will be very minimal) and what capacity card you go with. If you plan on doing a significant amount of writing, yo...

Getting a barcode scanner seems like overkill, unless you plan on having a bunch of people over for a tourney party, or you just like the whole badge concept. It's just RS232, so one could write a little program (or make a simple device) to send the same data that the barcode reader would. Can you t...

Hmmm... don't think I've ever tried one in a machine that had SATA.
If you have to use a motherboard that has SATA, I suppose you could try a CF->SATA converter:

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.8466

But that costs $10 more than the simple CF->IDE.

SMC 83c795 is the name of the controller chip used on the SMC 8416 EtherEZ ISA cards (8416T, 8416BT, 8416BTA). Other ethernet card manufacturers also use SMC controllers, although I haven't come across any other cards that use the 83c795.

Here's the data book for the SMC ethernet controller used in the 8416 network cards: http://www.scoresaves.info/misc/SMC_83c795.pdf Oh, and applejuice ... your Technical Setup page gets off to a bad start: An SMC8162T based serial card should be installed into one of the spare PCI slots in on the rf...

Here is a nice CF-IDE adaptor for $2.64 each in quantity (10+):

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.2720

My vote is for CF through the IDE. Clearly the most reliable way to go. And if you shop around you might even be able to pull it off for less than the cheap USB flash drive route.