Honestly the real trick nobody talks about is that you can rewire the original front panel header to talk to almost any modern board if you ditch the stupid standard and just map the pins yourself with a multimeter. Those old Gateway boards used a non standard layout but the switches themselves are just momentary contacts, same as today. The only hard part is the HDD LED since some old ones run at 5v and modern boards expect 3.3, so you might need to swap in a resistor or just leave it unplugged. I kept my original power button working on a B550 board by cutting the old connector and soldering directly to the mobo pins, took like 20 minutes. Most people just give up and drill a hole for a new switch, but that misses the whole point of a true sleeper.

Keeps happening with EVERYTHING around here lately, not just cars.

Yeah, hold up. I run a 6-inch in downtown Chicago and I see way more than a gray blob on most nights. Half the battle is just picking the right target, not the biggest mirror. People get obsessed with aperture like it's the only thing that matters, but a big scope in bad skies just magnifies the crud. That guy at Griffith probably spends more time gatekeeping than actually looking through his finder.

Three weeks in and my simple layout finally got me to actually use it.

Wow, that's brutal, reminds me of a guy who vanished on his team right before finals week.