Thinkpads Forum

So I ordered my T61 with a Media Card Slot.
What exactly does this mean?

Does it read xD cards on its own? Or do I need to buy some sort of adapter card? If the later, what should I look for?

Have read about some of the xD PCMCIA cards that read only 256 Mb chips but my hubby's camera uses 2Gb xD cards and my camera uses 1 Gb xD cards. So those won't work very well.

I guess there is always the 2 USB card readers we have, but would prefer to travel without them if possible.

Sorry to sound so dumb but my previous laptops (T23, T40 and now Dell D600) were all ordered for me by my employer.

Thanks in advance for your help.

4-in-1 media card in T61 supports SD, XD, MS, and MM formats. However I am not aware of how much capacity these are limited to.

Most media card reader support only FAT16, so the limit is 2GB.

ryengineer,

So are you saying it actually comes with a "card"?

Or is it just a "slot"?

I still don't understand.

cflutist wrote:ryengineer,So are you saying it actually comes with a "card"? Or is it just a "slot"?

It's a card reader, precisely.

It is a "reader": no cards included. Basically, the media card adapter is built into the expresscard slot if you choose this option.

XIII: are you talking about thinkpads only? I use 4GB CF cards everyday for photo work....(admittedly, the T61 doesn't support CF, so it's not really applicable....but I'd still think the built in adapter supports more than FAT16)

Dont these card readers come by default?? I have seen the dell and hp notebooks have them.

Great, thanks a lot for your help.

Now the ???? wait for the laptop. I've been given 3 different ESDs (just depends on which rep you get on the phone) so will just have to wait and see.

neednotebook wrote:Dont these card readers come by default?? I have seen the dell and hp notebooks have them.

Depends on the company. Some companies offer it with most of their models and others don't or give you an option to configure it like lenovo. Lenovo had been offering it with Z series (not sure if they still do) which is/(soon was) merely targeted at multimedia platform. Generally speaking, I don't see a point of adding this in business oriented machine like T-series (makes it little more heavy to carry around) so answering that criticism lenovo is giving you an facility to configure your machine with or without this option.

shuffle2 wrote:It is a "reader": no cards included. Basically, the media card adapter is built into the expresscard slot if you choose this option.

XIII: are you talking about thinkpads only? I use 4GB CF cards everyday for photo work....(admittedly, the T61 doesn't support CF, so it's not really applicable....but I'd still think the built in adapter supports more than FAT16)

I purchased and tested lots of multicard reader on the market and found out around 80% of them only support up to FAT16. The ones that support FAT32 are expensive so I don't think Lenovo can give you a real treat for the price. I may be wrong though. If any of you guys have a T61 with media card reader, posting what filesystem it can support will really help.

Check the lexar website, they have some pretty good CF cards and some are quite expensive but they will read/write faster and they will support fat32

Check the lexar website, they have some pretty good CF cards and some are quite expensive but they will read/write faster and they will support fat32.

Please people don't do what I have done twice, reformat your machine to factory and accidently leave your expensive CF cards in the slots, they become silicone wafers. I had a lexar that cost 60 bucks and toasted it that way.

XIII wrote:I purchased and tested lots of multicard reader on the market and found out around 80% of them only support up to FAT16. The ones that support FAT32 are expensive so I don't think Lenovo can give you a real treat for the price. I may be wrong though. If any of you guys have a T61 with media card reader, posting what filesystem it can support will really help.

Interesting. I, too, use CF, and have had no trouble with CF with my external Sandisk CF (not multicard) reader, the X31 built-in CF reader or the Delkin CardBus CF reader -- all support FAT32 just fine.

Perhaps I am wrong, but I thought a Compact Flash card was identical to a PCMCIA Cardbus card. Only the size was different. If that is the case, then a cardbus slot should support 32-bit PC cards and Compact Flash cards in at least the notebooks of the last several years.

OTOH, SD, Memory Stick, et al, need the reader which may in fact be 16-bit.

GomJabbar wrote:Perhaps I am wrong, but I thought a Compact Flash card was identical to a PCMCIA Cardbus card. Only the size was different. If that is the case, then a cardbus slot should support 32-bit PC cards and Compact Flash cards in at least the notebooks of the last several years.

CompactFlash is indeed about the same as the 16-bit PC Card -- nee PCMCIA -- interface, so you can use a passive CF-to-PCMCIA adapter. (It's actually an implementation of the ATA hard disk interface.) 32-bit CardBus is a little bit different, though, and the Delkin CardBus does require a driver. And my Sandisk reader does dangle at the end of a USB cable ...

Kyocera wrote:Please people don't do what I have done twice, reformat your machine to factory and accidently leave your expensive CF cards in the slots, they become silicone wafers. I had a lexar that cost 60 bucks and toasted it that way.

Why would reformatting affect cards in the PC Card slot?

I had a Lexar card go bad too, I don't think anyone uses Lexar anymore these days.