@moocow ISTR seeing a video of someone(it MIGHT have been Linus) doing that very thing..... IIRC, the person doing the deed, had some other, older CPU, that they simply plucked a couple of pins from, and soldered them onto the newer CPU that had a few broken off, and it worked fine. I'm sure for someone with the equipment and experience, this sort of fix is 'child's play', but certainly not something I'd want to pay $50 to experiment with.
