Do you have a cool trick to register high PR domains for cheap?
I never had a cool trick (and still haven't found one). Trust me I have looked.
There's some software out there that supposedly can magically grab these domains for you. One is called Snatcher, there's another called exDomain, plus a few others out there. They all cost money and with the one I bought, I didn't save much time or effort.
What I do is get a list of expiring domains and run the list through a few tools. Well, first I delete any domains that are too long, and anything with dashes, and anything with extensions I don't like (say, .ca or .me or whatever). That eliminates a bunch.
Then I run the remaining domains through a tool to check pagerank. I throw out everything with a PR below what I'm looking for - say, PR2. Then I filter the list further - for a few other things, including the number of currently indexed pages - and finally I do a bulk check to find the ones not registered.
The ones left - the supposedly non-registered domains - will either be registered (by someone like me) when I try to get them, will be renewed by the original owner, or will be available...and I can get them.
It's a long process but I've ended up with PR2, PR3, and PR4 domains by doing this. I built some PHP scripts to help me along with the process but this is STILL very tedious.
[The next step would be to get the previously-existing content for the domain(s). That's a whole 'nother story I'll get into in my book on private networks. There are a couple of tricks to it but for the most part you've heard it before (look at archive.org etc).]
It's been a while now since I've tried to get old domains. I just register new ones these days and build them from scratch.