FWIW, I have two machines.  One has an ISA ``WinModem'' (useless, but I
left it in since I didn't have any place else to put it).  The other has
no ISA slots at all.

Neither one actually uses any ISA slots.

Both have some hardware (as seen by dmesg) accesed via ISA,
however.  (lpt?, com?, fdc?, pckbc?, npx?)

The PCI cards that I have include: SCSI, Ethernet, video, and sound.  

Non-card PCI devices include pciide?, uhci?, pchb?, auvia?, and isa?.

Except for npx? support, and perhaps com? support, I could substitute USB
(mostly) hardware for the ISA stuff and kick off ISA support from my
system.  (I'm not sure what I could do w.r.t. fdc?, but since I don't use
lfoppies anyway, it's not a big deal.)


(Minor aside: If you have ISA in your system, you apparently have to
disable the ``Have a PnP aware OS'' BIOS option.  I don't understand
exactly what PnP does, but recall having problems when I experimentally
turned it on, once.  I had turned on the option because NetBSD seemed to
support PnP (``isapnp'', for example).  I had naive hopes that I could use
the ISA modem that shipped with the machine; I can't (it's a
``WinModem''), and prefer external modems anyway.)

The presense of some ISA hardware has not been inherently a problem for
me.


My two systems are:

 (a) A Gateway 2000 system from about 3 years ago.

 (b) A system built to my specs by United Micro (VIA motherboard),
     ordered in July of this year.


  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about." --rauch@eecs.ukans.edu