I just got an type II PcCard that will not fit in my type II slot.
Surprise ! There happen to be a notch on the side that is too thick to
get in my socket.

Trouble is : it fits fine in two or three recent laptops I tried.
More trouble : it does not fit in two or three vintage laptops I tried.

Question : is there a change of standard that made a type II slot
unable to accept a type II card ?
Or worse, has there been a kind of evolution (such as say 5V to 3,5V
swap, that made it necessary to have two different kind ot PCCard type
II slots ?

For those of you who happen to care and to have a huge amount of
Documentation, my laptop is a Compaq Armada 4150, and the PCCard is a
Belkin BusPort Mobile.

And I'd find it disturbing to find that you need a new PC (that is
probably with USB port installed) to be able to add USB support to your
laptop.

On the other hand, if the problem is just to alter the physical
dimensions of the Card, I can do that easy.

Any information welcome.
TIA & regards
Volny

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Volny DE PASCALE <@essayez le nom de notre ville point cgt at wanadoo.fr> wrote:
The newer card is a 32-bit CardBus card. It won't work in older slots
that only support 16-bit cards.

This is true. USB adapter cards are, as far as I know, all 32-bit
cards.

-- Dave

dhinds (AT) sonic (DOT) net a pensé très fort :
Wow. Thanks a lot. I'd better not fool with notch then.
Regards
Volny

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There WAS a change to the PCMCIA spec. The original spec was approximately
equivalent to the original ISA slot on older motherboards which was a 16bit
interface[using a 5V I/O]. An upgrade (ha, ha !!!!!) was added [I don't know
what year] to achieve a 32bit interface, similar to the PCI slots of newer
motherboards [using a 3.3V I/O]. DO NOT modify a this 'Cardbus' type card to
fit the older laptops, you could damage either the card, the PC or both if
you try to use a cardbus module in the 16bit (although a laptop Cardbus slot
might be backwards compatible with the 16bit cards - I haven't verified
that - someone else on this group probably knows for sure.). I'm personally
really peaved at the industry for this confusion, but mostly at vendors of
the cards for not taking the ad space to insure the buyer really knows what
a pc card is compatible with.
A further rant is that to the best of my knowledge there are no 16bit pc
card interface modules that provide an owner to add USB [even v1.1] to a
legacy notebook, or even any ISA cards to do that for legacy desktops - even
though there is no technical reason prohibiting this, just seems to be a
marketing decision!! The same goes for legacy floppy drives - NO USB to
floppy adapters exist except for 1.44Mb 3.5"ers. There are scads of USB
interfaced boxes that accept IDE hard drives of all physical sizes, but none
that accept generic 34pin floppy drives, again not technically impossible -
just not enough demand, apparently. I guess it's time I got one of those
3.5" units and cut it up to see if a 5-1/4" floppy could be hooked in - of
course there will probably still be incompatibilities with the software
drivers making it impossible to talk to the drive properly. So, if people
still have old data on those 360K or 1.2M floppies they'll have to put an
old legacy desktop together and a 5-1/4" floppy to get access to that data.
Of course this is only a problem for those of us who have been using PCs for
more than 10 - 15 years, so it's not a big deal - right? Actually anyone
that is toying with OS emulation packages probably need to access some
5-1/4" floppies to get the original OS distributions into your PCs - of
course, it is just barely possible that there is a monetary incentive to a
mfr to NOT make this kind of I/O - even I am not that paranoid!! - end rant
"Volny DE PASCALE" <@essayez le nom de notre ville point CGT at wanadoo.fr>
wrote in message news:mesnews.08637d46.a4550686.5.7147 (AT) essayezlenomdeno (DOT) ..

Very sorry, but you can't get what you want/need. The only PCMCIA cards that
are available to add USB are what is now called 'cardbus' cards and they are
32bit i/o data path - this is the laptop equivalent of the 32bit PCI cards
indesktop PCs. your laptop sounds as if it is old enough to be compatible
ONLY with 16bit i/o data path cards what most people now call 'pccards' -
they are the equivalent of the 16bit ISA cards used in older desktop PCs. I
have been searching for a 16bit PCMCIA or ISA adapter for USB for years and
had NO luck. The 32bit cards are designed so they WON'T fit into the older
16bit slots on laptops. The terms type I, II or III are only related to the
thickness of the card. Yes, 'you' must buy a newer laptop to get USB in a
laptop. Don't try to force the card into the slot - even if you get it into
the laptop, the software 'will not; see it and you may [probably will]
damage the laptop and/or the card!!
"Volny DE PASCALE" <@essayez le nom de notre ville point CGT at wanadoo.fr>
wrote in message news:mesnews.08637d46.a4550686.5.7147 (AT) essayezlenomdeno (DOT) ..