As a newbie to Pics I have followed the list for some time via the Iversoft
archive.  My first project worked fine after some serious learning
experiences. But I was left a little short in the drive capability area.
Before building some driver circuitry I thought I might try the
unconventional approach. I placed two Pics 16F84 in parallel, pin for pin,
except the 10Mhz OSC out of the first Pic went to the OSC in on the second
Pic. Both chips had the same progamme burnt in. My programme is some 300
lines of (newbie) code with TOCK being used as a 32,768 input and RB0 used
as an input also. The outputs are 11 Leds each at the 60 ma. level.  Clearly
I expected this to work and to my suprise it did. It has now run non-stop
for a week, no smoke out of the Pics and the programme does everything I
intended it to.
Question. Is this a serious case of mind over matter or have I found
something which might be of use to some of you. (Pardon. ..some of US)
For those brave souls with more Pics than sense, an easy way to place the
chips in parallel is to remove pin 15 from the cheaper variety of  18 pin
socket, splay the pins slightly and gently press over your 16F84. Most
important to line up the indicating marks so that you know which end of the
Pic is which.  It helps if this chip is in a turned pin socket and clamped
for the next operation. You will see that each solder pin of the socket sits
neatly over the shoulder of the Pic pins. Deep breath and solder all pins to
shoulders  EXCEPT  pin 16.  Gently bend  this pin until you can solder it to
the shoulder of pin 15 of your PIC. A gentle touch and a fine solder bit
makes this easy. You now have a Pic sandwich with  nice turned pins to plug
into your application/programmer and a somewhat dubious socket on top to
accept the second Pic.
Those of you with a Dontronics DT001 will now find that you can programme
both chips at the same time.(Very happy with mine) Your mileage may vary
according to your own setup.
Can I stress that this Kluge does work on my software but that I lack the
knowhow to even guess if it will be of use to anyone else. I think that
perhaps after such a long first post I should now sink back into obscurity
and continue my lurking.
Have fun and consider the likely pushing and shoving in the ranks if your
Pics do not have the same programme.!!!

TK