The end of PCMCIA?

Zapho

I've been searching for a good powerful laptop lately which I'm getting through work, but as a result I have to get a Dell, no choice. So after browsing for a bit I decided I'll stick to Inspirons, (I own one at the moment, and it hasn't let me down). Once I got the list of stats I say this :

"Express card slot: Not compatable with any PC card devices"

So inspirons don't come with PCMCIA slots anymore, which is just silly! And what is this 'express card slot' and are there many devices that use it? Looks like my audigy 2 card is outdated already......

Tom Dunne

Zapho wrote:

So inspirons don't come with PCMCIA slots anymore, which is just silly! And what is this 'express card slot' and are there many devices that use it? Looks like my audigy 2 card is outdated already......

Yeah, this caught me out before when I ordered an inspiron for my mother in law.

From what I remember, there was only one friggin' card available for the new format, pretty useless and taking future-proofing to the extreme.

Details on the express card website here.

Capt'n Midnight

one of the orinoco usb wifi adaptors has a pcmcia card in it
so unless it's a very specific hack job there might exist somewhere a USB adaptor that takes pcmcia cards.

Ruu_Old

A bit silly to remove PCMCIA card slots from the laptops, as tom mentioned there only being one type of card size for the express slot and 3 different types (I think) for PCMCIA.

jimi_t

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

one of the orinoco usb wifi adaptors has a pcmcia card in it
so unless it's a very specific hack job there might exist somewhere a USB adaptor that takes pcmcia cards.

But isn't the PCMCIA connection a LOT faster than USB2.0 - negating a large part of the benefit and rendering certain cards useless?

Zapho

Surely it would have been better to make a gradual change, adding new features, while maintaining backwards compatability, especially when companies are changing across so slowly

Tom Dunne

jimi_t wrote:

But isn't the PCMCIA connection a LOT faster than USB2.0 - negating a large part of the benefit and rendering certain cards useless?

No, I think USB 2.0 (@ 480 Mbps) is faster than PCMCIA. See here for details.

Zapho

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

one of the orinoco usb wifi adaptors has a pcmcia card in it
so unless it's a very specific hack job there might exist somewhere a USB adaptor that takes pcmcia cards.

I had a quick search and couldn't find any. If anyone found one, I'd be very happy

Tom Dunne

Born to make you happy, as Britney would say.

http://www.everythingusb.com/elan_u111_usb_card_reader.html

Capt'n Midnight

tom dunne wrote:

Born to make you happy, as Britney would say.

http://www.everythingusb.com/elan_u111_usb_card_reader.html

As of this writing, only Merlin 530 and 630-series are supported.

The company, however, has plans to support all major brand 16-bit PC Card and Compact Flash modem cards as well.so still have to wait.

/hang on

http://www.elandigitalsystems.com/usb/u111.php
http://www.arstech.com/item--usb2pcmcia.html

secret_squirrel

You gotta be careful - those adaptors only support a small subset of PCCards.

there are a couple of other models floating around that only support flash disks and the like.

Express Card are stupidly hard to find at the moment it seems.

Zapho

Most of them seem to support 16bit cards only.