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"Help! About Laptop"

Note: Posted in both Web Forums and SR Help Forums to get more attention:

Hi there, after wondering for a while what the funny looking drive things was on the side of my laptop i decided to ask one of my tutors what it was he told me that it was a PC Card Slot (PCMCIA). Now hearing this i wondered what the hell does that mean so he told me that it is a way of upgrading my laptop, so i thought hmmm i bet its hard to find these type of cards etc... so i asked he said no there quite often, anyways what i want to know is can anyone tell me more about this Card Slot and what it does and also what things it can upgrade and lastly anywhere that sells any of the card etc...? Hopefully SR does

DeltaJava wrote:
> You still have an Amiga?
>
> I lost interest after buying OS 3.5. What's been happening lately?

I do still have it - it lives in the loft - haven't used it in about 3 years. I think remarkably little is happening at the moment - they're still promising a wonderful new format etc. www.amiga.com seems to have a lot of info on it.

You still have an Amiga?

I lost interest after buying OS 3.5. What's been happening lately?

DeltaJava wrote:
> They were included in Amigas (A1200 model) years ago; form my past
> experience, they were used for things such as extra memory and TV
> deflcikerer things which I never understood.

Quite a lot of Amiga kit is available for it. Mine runs a SCSI interface, which allows connection of a CD ROM and Zip, and also provides an extra serial port.

PCMCIA (Personal Computer Memory Card International Association) cards are basically just I/O cards (input/output) you will not get a graphics card with this and if you want to upgrade your lappie memory that is usually simple enough but not through a PCMCIA card, if you are having trouble with games or dvd's on your laptop it is either the graphics, cpu and memory are to low spec or try giving your onboard graphics more ram to use this helps especially for things like dvd playback, you can do this through your BIOS.

c.b

They were included in Amigas (A1200 model) years ago; form my past experience, they were used for things such as extra memory and TV deflcikerer things which I never understood. Of course, there's no need for them now because PCs are so much more advanced.

er, no..

Any chance that graphics cards are available?

Flash memory
sound cards
firewire ports


lots of things

expect to pay though

Oh ok thanks for you help but if anyone else no's anything as well that wld be helpful. Im sure my teacher said that it could be used for memory as well, i also wonder if there was any graphics cards at all?

PCMCIA slots are used for network cards and modems. Suppose you could argue the fact that adding a network card is an upgrade, but off the top of my head I cant think of any other peripherals that use PCMCIA slots. They are not hard to find at all - completely the opposite. All major manufactures of network cards and modems will do them. 3com, Intel, Compaq.

see http://www.pcmcia.org for more background reading about the technology.