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If it's only for telescope control and imaging, get yourself an OLD secondhand laptop. They will have REAL serial and parallel ports, will generally run XP. Depends on how deep your pockets are.
Downsides are that you might struggle with things like firewire availability, and be limited to USB 1.1 speeds onboard. You can get decent USB2.0 and firewire combo PCMCIA cards though to overcome this. This is a damn sight easier than trying to get a proper parallel port, and the whole USB<->serial converter issue is russian roulette (I killed my firmware on my LX200GPS doing this with a USB<->Serial converter, and had to dig up an old laptop in order to reload the firmware properly).
Main advantages are that (a) they're cheap (maybe a few hundred bucks off ebay or some of the notebook stores), (b) you won't worry too much about them being outside and getting damaged.
Main disadvantage outside the above-mentioned items is that batteries for them will normally be hard to find/won't hold a charge. You might be limited using them with AC power, or need to get the innards of the battery replaced (there are places that do this) so they hold a charge for a while.
The only other things to watch out for are:-
- small hard drives (20Gig was BIG back then) - won't hold much in the way of planetary AVIs, and the drives were slow.
- CPU grunt might be a problem if you have a lot going on (ie guiding with a webcam and trying to do something else at the same time)
- Can't really use them for processing images either - they were normally VERY limited in memory (my old laptop maxed out at 192Mb)
In the end, I got a laptop about 2 years ago, but it was nearly impossible to get something reasonably fast and still have a PCMCIA slot (nowdays they appear to have been replaced with ExpressCard slots and good luck trying to find a proper parallel port for that yet)
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