701c Fussy PCMCIA Slots Under Windows 98?

[SMurf]

Hello,

I've recently taken possession of a beaten-up 701c. There's cracks and scratches aplenty, even what looks like weather damage, although thankfully everything still works, including the nifty keyboard.

Well, in saying that, I'm not too sure about the PCMCIA slots. I tried earlier to use a Lexar Compactflash card with a PCMCIA adapter and several times the system crashed under Windows 98 just as I was accepting the installation of the Standard IDE Hard Disk Controller (mshdc) for it. Each time I heard the card inserted sound from the internal speaker but everything stopped responding. Removal of the card during this time either invoked a "harder" crash, did nothing at all or, once, completed installation of the driver!

Thankfully I managed to get my network card's driver off of it and never looked back (the network card installed just fine, although it was quite a long time at the same stage as before (accepting the driver). Does anyone know if this normal and the controller is fussy, or should I be checking out what this weather damage entails?

[tfflivemb2]

Were you using the correct PCMCIA adapter version?

I believe that the 701 uses 16bit cards, instead of the more common 32bit cards. (someone correct me if I am wrong). Sometimes the newer cards will be detected by Windows, but they aren't supported. I know that I can't use my regular PCMCIA wireless cards on it, because they are too new.

[SMurf]

I know the difference between PCMCIA and Cardbus and certainly no flash memory adapter that I've seen uses Cardbus. Plus, as I said, it did work in the end, so maybe a 16-bit slot can "learn" Cardbus if you ram it in there enough times?

Anyway, it was probably because of all the things the previous owner had been shoving in there. Going into Safe Mode revealed drivers for CD-ROM drives, SCSI adapters and all sorts installed! Reinstalling seems to have cleared it up.