One thing about technological progress, your legacy devices will no longer work with the ever newer hardware incorporated with the new computers. Take for instance the PCMCIA PC Card, the new laptops do not support them anymore. They have come up with a new type of PC Card slot called the ExpressCard.

The ExpressCard slot was meant to replace the PCMCIA slot as it has a faster bandwidth connection and was based on the PCI Express and USB2.0 standard. The ExpressCard slot has an L-shape indent to fit the narrower 34mm socket to differentiate it from its predecessor. Also the ExpressCard is physically and technically incompatible, thus all the new laptops could not have dual slot function in the same socket.

Either the ExpressCard is quite new or not many vendor support this new socket because I could not find many products that uses this kind of slot in the market. I could only find one shop displaying some ExpressCard products but mostly I could see only PCMCIA devices being sold in the retail shops. One of the products like the IZZI “4G” wireless internet broadband service also uses the older PCMCIA standard.

As I have some device that I would like to make use of, I decided to purchase a PCMCIA PCI card adapter that could insert the PCMCIA card. The current going rate for this product was about RM70 at the ALL IT retail outlet. This item has a fast sales turnover due to IZZI wireless card requires a PCMCIA slot. It was the last piece when I decided to purchase it.

It uses a Ricoh chipset and installation was fairly easy as no device driver was needed to install it into the desktop PC. Though sometimes it was rather buggy as my Windows Vista could not detect the PCI card properly once in a while during boot up.

Once it could be detected, PC cards that were inserted, they were recognized by Windows Vista and the appropriate drivers were installed by Vista to run it. No drivers were included with the package as it relied on Windows to provide the necessary drivers. I could run my old legacy Zip-Drive 250 connector, my SmartMedia card reader, and my old Kingston Compact Flash card reader. I didn’t try it on my old 28.8kbps Motorola dial-up modem, but I presume it should recognize it if I were to test it out since it was such an old hardware.

As technology moves on, eventually the PCMCIA standard will be dropped completely in favour of faster socket like the ExpressCard, or the versatile USB2.0 ports. But for now, if you have to use products that need this kind of slot, no choice but to get a PCMCIA PCI card adapter in order to run it.