Upgrading Fujitsu Siemens PC ... or not

Recently bought a brand new Fujitsu Siemens Scaleo system to be the audio workhorse for my little studio. It has 1G memory and about half a TB of disk, powered by a Pentium 4 running 3.odd Ghz. It has all the typical attributes from DVD burner to tons of USB and other connectors. However, because I need to put a better audio card and also a video card in it, I checked the back of the unit, and I was happy to see that there were 4 empty slots covered by metall brackets.

Two weeks later, I got around installing all the necessary software (btw, Propellerheads Reason provided the greatest fun I had for a long time), but when I switched to the hardware installation, I got nowhere. Issue No.1: the PC does not have a parallel port! I mean, geez, that can't be a cost saving limitation, in fact, both the case and the motherboard provide the connectors, but Fujitsu Siemens apparently thought there weren't any LPT devices out there anymore. Because I need to connect the MOTU MIDI mapper to the PC, I'm stuck.

Issue No.2: Three of the slots in the back go nowhere. The motherboard ends after slot 4, and the remaining brackets are completely useless. Now I'm getting annoyed. I thought I could use one of the slots for a cheap LPT card, so I don't have to buy another MIDI mapper with a USB connector. Wrong. Even after I threw out the obsolete modem card, I'm still short one PCI slot. I think I'll return the system and get a Dell.