On 6/12/06, Scott Quinn <compoobah at valleyimplants.com> wrote: Not a bad choice. Does yours have GPIB, parallel, Ethernet, PCMCIA and a bunch of other computer-type connectors on the back, or is it "just" an O-scope? If you have conenctors, you can hook a printer directly up, or even transfer screen shots to disk (PCMCIA Type III hard disk, or Microdrive w/CF adapter, or flash card), or over the network. That's why the advice here was to look for a scope with the probes. Unfortunately, at auctions, it's common to get the scope bare. I got an ancient Tek scope that way (small round tube, large box - larger than a 465). Fortunately, I had a buddy who worked at the local Physics department, and he found a 1965 Tek probe with accessories, NIB. Look around the BNC for your probe... if there are gold pads about 1mm^2, the scope is expecting compatible probes that will "tell" the scope what the probe's characteristics are. I _think_ you can use an older, "dumb" probe, but more stuff might have to set manually. The probes themselves have a larger base than "dumb" probes, and they have spring-loaded pins in several locations in an arc around the BNC to communicate simple information about the nature of the probe. Ah... you do have one of the modern fancy ones. If your scope is like our HP ones, you ought to back up the internal hard drive. The HP we have here runs plain Windows 98, but it has special drivers for the ISA card that plugs into the bog-standard motherboard. HP needs to know some details about the internals of the scope to get you the right image (we've been down that path twice here since we bought it - the laptop drives don't last more than a couple of years when run at 670 millibars). About all I can say is if you've used an analog scope, most of this will be familiar - you'll just have to learn how the menus work to get to the various functions that were like turning a knob in the old days. -ethan