New Laptop Suggestion - Need to Read PCMCIA Cards

[gabegall]

Hello Everyone,

I'm in need of a new laptop for work and was wondering what everyone uses.  My main concern is having the ability to read PCMCIA cards from the Nortel ERS 8600s.  It seems that all the manufacturers have gone to ExpressCards and do not offer PCMCIA as a built-in solution.  It would also be a plus, but not a necessity, to have a serial port so I do not need to drag around a USB to serial dongle.

If there's no chance of getting PCMCIA built-in, what USB readers have you guys had success with?  I have already tried StarTech.com's Cardbus to ExpressCard Adapter for reading cards from the ERS8600.  Unfortunately, it causes one of the newer HP laptops to freeze up for any "mass media" card.  However, it works well for the Cisco Wireless PCMCIA cards.

Thanks for your help,

Gabe

[Michael McNamara]

Hi Gabe and welcome to the forums!

We use HP EliteBook 8440p within our organization which doesn't come with a serial port and also has a ExpressCard slot as opposed to the legacy PCMCIA card slot. It was pretty funny the first time one or our engineers tried to get his Cisco Aironet PCMCIA card into his new laptop so he could perform a wireless survey with AirMagnet. It took him about 5 minutes to figure out that the slot wasn't a PCMCIA slot at all and that's why the card wouldn't fit.

I use a Prolific USB to serial adapter personally... I think you might be able to find a few manufacturers making laptops with serial ports but the mainstream corporate laptops (single model in my organization) are probably never going to see serial ports again. You might need to get use to the idea of carrying around that USB to serial adapter for quite some time.

With respect to the compact flash cards for the ERS 8600... I've never really needed to put one in a laptop myself. I usually just boot the switch and then transfer the files to/from the PCMCIA card via the switch management interface. I usually operate remotely so since I'm not onsite I don't really have the opportunity to interact with the PCMCIA card.

Have you tried to use your adapter with a Linux distribution? You could try booting a Linux "Live" distro from a CD/DVD and see if it can access the PCMCIA card. Other than StarTech there aren't many options out there...

Good Luck!