I’m going to be getting an older Toshiba pen computer to use as an ebook. It comes with two PCMCIA Type II card slots and Windows 3.1 ( andwith 4mb of RAM I have no plans to put in anything later).
I have a PCMCIA (no, a “PC card” plugs into an ISA slot, thank you very much!) that I might plug into one of the slots. At a later date I might add a PCMCIA hard drive.
Questions:
Do I understand correctly that the PCMCIA protocol is plug and play, generally whether or not the OS supports Plug and Pray?
If yes, then I shouldn’t have too big of problems getting the 'puter to recognize my additional hardware?
PCMCIA “Plug and Play” ability in real world terms is mediated by the card drivers, the PC BIOS and the OS all dancing together. If Win 3.1 does not support P&P for this card you will most likely have to load the drivers via the autoexec.bat and config.sys file statements which is sometimes a frustrating process. Win 3.1 was not big on PCMCIA support being built into the OS so make sure you have the older drivers necessary for this project before committing.
I would guess a machine this limited in memory and resources is going to be a challenge to use even as an ebook given how big some ebook files are and the fact that many ebooks are now coming out in pdf format and are multiple megabytes in size. Good luck with your project.
I’ve hosted that dance before. It’s not fun, but I used to do it JUST TO DO IT. As soon as I got it working I’d lose interest and uninstall it. I suppose that is my main geek cred.
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Just won an auction for an 8meg upgrade for it. I can get most anything running okay in 12megs, especially since most of the stuff I plan to read isn’t even IN ebook format. That God for Project Gutenburg and its ASCII files! And I’m not afraid of DOS.
This unit was originally to be mounted on my wall and running some home automation software, except the one I won is TOO NICE! Color, not monochrome, and a new battery. I still have to win the GRiD that I really need for the X10 project. But I might end up with another one of these–cheaper!
For Bog’s sake, put Win '95 on it. Even if it’s only 4 megs. Heck, check Ebay, you can probably get a memory upgrade for low-bucks.
Speaking as somebody who only upgraded from a 486 a couple of years ago, the two best things you can do to an old computer is put win 9x on it, and add more memory. If you do this, your system can be usuable (web browser, email, ebooks, etc).
You still need Win3.1 drivers for your PCMCIA cards. That may not be available for some newer hardware. Plug and Play just means the card+driver can configure themselves without human intervention (i.e. no dip switches and jumpers). You probably knew this already, but just wanted to make sure.
Which would require a PCMCIA CD-ROM. If only at first, I’m back at my original question. Then I need to track down the pen extensions…
What means this phrase “newer hardware?” Oh, I think you mean “made in the late '90s or later!” Hmmmm, that’s a concept, but it’ll hurt the feelings of my stuff from the mid '80s.
And no, I wasn’t entirely sure what “Plug and Play” meant. See my comment on “newer hardware.” But I’m getting better. I not only have two computers that are two years old or younger but I have also never been inside them! I feel so modern!
By “newer hardware” I mean any hardware made after DOS and Win3.1 became obsolete and hardware manufacturers stopped supplying drivers for Win3.1. That’d be '97 or later, I think, though many companies continued to supply Win3.1 drivers after that.
There are ways of installing Win95 without CD-ROM. One way is obviously to use floppies; I’m pretty sure Win95 was available on floppies. Another way is to remove the hard drive, connect it to a desktop computer and copy the contents of a Win95 installation CD. This involves opening the desktop computer, plugging in an adapter (which you’ll need to buy, but it’s cheap) on the IDE cable, and connecting the hard drive from the laptop. I’ve done it a few times, and it’s not that hard.
By the way, I’m not very sure Win95 works on 12 megs. Anybody know for sure? Another option is to use Linux, depending on what you want to do with the computer.
I’m shocked–SHOCKED–to hear that DOS is obsolete! After all, how else can you make Wordstar or Quattro on a 286 run as fast as Word or Excel on a Pentium IV?
And Win95 runs in 12mb. Well, jogs, actually, but better than its crawl in 8mb.
In addition to SCR’s ideas if you’ve got a PCMCIA ethernet card that will network with 3.1 drivers you can map a more modern PC‘s CD drive to it and you can install Win95 from there or (preferably) copy just the WIN95 CD’s install binaries (not all the other junk) over to a directory on the pen PC and install from that directory.
In addition to atro and scr’s ideas, you can also buy (or, possibly, “loan my”) parallel port to narrow scsi adapter, and connect an external scsi cdrom drive to it. The one I have was made by a company named Trantor, which was then bought by Adaptec. dos and win 95 drivers are available for most models. I found it on Ebay for ~$20.
In addition to atro and scr’s ideas, you can also buy (or, depending on where you live, “loan my”) parallel port to narrow scsi adapter, and connect an external scsi cdrom drive to it. The one I have was made by a company named Trantor, which was then bought by Adaptec. dos and win 95 drivers are available for most models. I found it on Ebay for ~$20.
And I believe that I once used a 486sx laptop with 4 megs of memory on it that was running win 95. Not very quickly, mind you, but it was running it. I think that 16 megs is the line where things start going rather smoothly.
Okay, it’ll be faster when I get the 8megs into it, but it recognizes my printing better than a Palm. In color, too (640X480, 256 colors). And the battery holds a charge! I’ve transfered a few books over to it and am reading them in WinWrite. Well worth fifty bucks.
Hell, if it had a proper parallel port I’d just use the Zip drive on it. Proprietary connector, though, and looks like it would be a much smaller pain to BUY a cable than to BUILD one for it. I’d probably spend as much for the oddball connector. But stuff moves through the serial prt pretty well, HyperTerm to WinTerm.
