Newbie question about those little laptop cards

[Reverend Maynard]

Howdy all. Just got a cheap ole little laptop, p2 400 Sony Viao. My question is this...Both the cd-rom and the NIC connect to the machine through one of those PC card slots...I only have one slot however, can I remove one card and put the other in while the machine is running, or do I need to shut down each time I switch devices?

[The PIT]

You'll have to shut the devices down first or you'll get a little message slapping your wrist. This is either in the control panel or also displayed in sys tray.
Taking the cards put without stopping them can cause driver corruption or confuse the machine completly. I've seen this plenty of times at work and it can been a real pain to get them working again.

[Jorden]

The times I worked with Sony Vaio's I just unplugged the CD-ROM's PCMCIA card, getting a nice jingle sound from the Vaio, and plugging the network PCMCIA card in, receiving another nice jingle sound from the Vaio, without corruption of drivers or having to shut them down.

Ofcourse, when the CD is reading, you don't unplug it, anyone would know that. But it doesn't harm things.

And present day OS's make it possible to unplug and replug PCMCIA cards, without trouble. If your Vaio has Win95, all you need to do is update it to Win95 OSR/2 to update it. If it runs later Win9x or Win2k, it shouldn't be much of a problem anyway.

Jord.

[The PIT]

Eek don't listen to Jorden. I've seen to many laptops come to work where they've just unplugged the pcmcia card and then found that the pcmcia doesn't work anymore.
If there lucky it just a case of re-installing the drivers. If they not and removing all visable drivers/pcmcia card services doesn't fix the problem a re-install is often the next course of action.
Still it keeps employed I suppose. 99 times out of 100 you'll probably be okay it's just that once.
It takes two seconds to stop the darn thing which is a lot less hassle if things go wrong.

[SCompRacer]

A friend has a new Z505 Vaio and I thought I saw a disconnect or unplug a device option among the thousands (a little exaggeration here) of icons in the taskbar.

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A little edit here, it has Win2000 on it.

[This message has been edited by SCompRacer (edited 06 April 2001).]

[Jorden]

Eek don't listen to me then Or read my post

If you have an icon in the system tray as Scompy said, press that one first, to be sure. Sony Vaio's are a bunch themselves anyway, they will crash at one point without you being able to do something about it anyway

Jord.

[SteveC]

Just put win2k on it and then you can plug in and unplug cards till your heart's content. (Or you've bent up all the PCMCIA port's pins )

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Cheers,
Steve

"Life is what we make of it, yet most of us just fake"

[Reverend Maynard]

Thanks all. The shutting down of the device sounds about right. My original question was whether I had to shut the entire machine down, and it doesnt look like I have to. I'm a rather patient guy, I can wait 10 secs for the device to shut down before I unplug it.