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Re: pcmcia/cardbus vs. firewire



Dell has really went down hill. They seem to concentrate more on looks than quality hardware these days. I have pretty much stopped using them since I went through an identical scenario as you just described via my last laptop purchase from them. 
 
 
In a message dated 8/28/2007 2:26:53 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, dave@linkify.com writes:
Two observations/hypotheses:

1 - the demise of PCMCIA
2 - poor mainstream acceptance of Firewire

I just got an MOTU UltraLite (audio digital interface) that didn't work
with the Firewire in the laptop, perhaps either because it didn't like
the 4-pin format (needs 6-pin), but also because MOTU requires either
the TI or the Lucent 1394 chipset, and the laptop used a Ricoh 1394
chipset.

I decided to get a PCMCIA Firewire card, and found out that, to my
surprise, my (also new) laptop didn't have a PCMCIA slot.  It has an
ExpressCard slot, which is not reverse compatible to PCMCIA.  (I also
have to buy a new wireless data card.)

So, I bought an ExpressCard Firewire card that has both 6-pin and 9-pin
800/400 1394 (http://www.siig.com/ViewProduct.aspx?pn=NN-EC2812-S1).

Except for having a hunk of plastic hanging off the side of my laptop, I
have been EXTREMELY happy with it.  ALL of my latency problems have
disappeared (I was using a pretty beefy but single core laptop with USB2
- Tascam 428).

In addition to the conspicuous deprecation of a PCMCIA slot, it's
curious that a $4000 Dell multimedia laptop
(http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/xpsnb_m1710?c=
us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19) - with 6 USB ports - only has a single, 4-pin 1394
port.

Dave Huffman

 




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