Newbie questions ... (yikes! :)

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Wed, Mar 09, 2005 at 11:33:37AM -0500, Bruce Smith wrote:
> 
> The new powerbooks claim to have:
> "One PC Card/CardBus slot supporting one Type I or Type II card"
> Is that PCMCIA or something else?

Yes and no. It is a 3 volt 32bit slot, The PCMCIA cards are 5 volt 
16 bit. Generally Cardbus slots are backward compatible, but Cardbus
cards are not. So your PCMCIA Orinoco WiFi card will work fine on your
latest powerbook but your Belkin Wifi card (broadcom chipset) which works
fine with MacOS X 10,3 will not work at all on a PCMCIA laptop (e.g. 1400).

As far as I know, the last laptop with a PCMCIA slot was the 3400.
The first "G3 powerbook" aka the Kanga (3500) had cardbus slots.

So it's a relatively safe bet that any G3 or later laptop has Cardbus
slots and will also accept PCMCIA cards.

Be sure to note that just becuase it is electricaly compatible does not
mean that it will work especialy with WiFi cards. There are very few
WiFi cards supported under MacOS X, and more, but mostly different ones
that are supported under Linux.

Hint: The original Apple Airport base station has an Orinoco (Wavelan)
card in it. It will work in just about any powerbook and is well supported
in both MacOS (7.6 on up) and Linux. 

Geoff.

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