Modern motherboard with legacy parallel port

[VicVega1]

Hi everybody!
I'm looking for a relatively modern motherboard that has a parallel LPT port (for an old <but gold> HP1100 Laserjet printer), a VGA and a PS2 port.
Idea is to replace my dad's 15 year old office PC, that has just died. As it will mostly deal with excel and e-mails I'm not looking for power here. I'm leaning towards AMD since it's cheaper. Sata 3 would be nice.
Any recommendations?
PS. I know that this is a motherboard section, but any suggestions towards other components (CPU, PSU, case) would be greatly appreciated.

 

[molletts]

A lot of boards have a pin-header for a parallel port - you can get an I/O bracket to bring it out to the rear of the PC. Very few (if any) have an actual port on the back these days. I would have suggested a USB to parallel adaptor but I have a LJ1100 so I know it has a 1284C port so you'd have to try to find another adaptor to connect that to the USB adaptor!

AMD boards in particular seem to have PS/2 ports more often than Intel ones, although you could use a PS/2 to USB adaptor to connect your dad's favourite keyboard/mouse if there isn't a PS/2 port on the board. (I use one with my KeyTronic classic keyboard - it's so old I have to use an AT to PS/2 adapter as well! I actually prefer it to the expensive mechanical keyboard I have on my other PC - it's got a nice heavy touch and lots of tactile feedback.)

I think most boards with onboard graphics probably come with VGA ports but if not, look for a DVI port instead - you can use a DVI-I to VGA adaptor (the board may well come with one) to connect an analogue monitor to it.

 

[Gingerbread]

Personally I would buy any motherboard that seems reasonable and spend 5-10$ on a PCI(-E) to LPT port.

 

[CountMike]

You don't necessarily need LPT port, there are Parallel to USB adapters http://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-SBT-UPPC-Centronics-Printer-Cable/dp/B0007UVRVO I'm using one like that right now.

 

[VicVega1]

Thanks for the feedback, guys, appreciate it! I normally respond right away, but for some reason my e-mail notifications are off..
molletts - exactly! an adaptor to an adaptor and no guarantee it will work. and for some reason they're very hard to find where I live. Does your 1100 also need an hour to print out a bigger PDF file?
Gingerbread - yes, that was Plan B well actually plan C - plan B was to get a new printer, but my dad just doesn't want to give up the old 1100 laserjet
CountMike - couldn't find the correct one anywhere.

Once again, thanks for your replies.
I managed to find a mobo with an LPT, though, and so I ended up getting a Gigabyte GA-H81M-DS2 board - link to manufacturer
I paired it with a G1840 Celeron, 4GB of RAM, an ADATA SSD.. and that has to be the least exciting build I've ever done in my life

 

[molletts]

molletts - exactly! an adaptor to an adaptor and no guarantee it will work. and for some reason they're very hard to find where I live. Does your 1100 also need an hour to print out a bigger PDF file?

It's not the quickest printer on the block but it's never taken an hour to do anything! I guess anything that is sent to the printer as raster graphics will take a while because of the volume of data which has to be a) uploaded to the printer and b) processed by the printer's formatter. I use Linux with a semi-generic PCL5e driver which lets the printer do the text rendering, which it is pretty quick at. There is an official HP driver which supposedly gives better print quality (although I can't see any difference in text documents which make up 99% of my printing) but it's much slower - I suspect it's doing all the rendering on the PC and sending the result as a full-page bitmap image which the printer struggles to digest. I suppose you could try using the HP Universal Printing PCL5 driver to see if it's any faster - I've used it with a few older printers that aren't officially supported by it to get them working with Server 2012R2 at work when there isn't an official driver available. You do have to configure the device options (8MB memory, no duplexer, no hard drive, etc.) manually, though.

It's worth pointing out that the 1100 is an ECP device - make sure you've got ECP mode selected in the BIOS for the parallel port in your new build (rather than SPP or EPP). That way, it should upload data to the printer much faster using DMA. (Unfortunately, I can't use ECP on my new system - I use a bracket connected to a pin-header on the motherboard and the ribbon cable isn't high-enough-quality so I get corrupt pages. My old PC, which had a hard-wired port on the ATX I/O panel, worked fine in ECP mode and was noticeably faster when printing.)