VOGONS


First post, by UltimaPlayer12

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Hi there! I haven't been on VOGONS in a long while, but in the time that I have been gone I acquired a new toy. A Toshiba Satellite Pro 430CDT! Unfortunately, it seems that either my USB Floppy Drive for my modern PC or the laptop drive is going out (or alternatively, every single floppy disk I have is dying... possible, but not likely considering how many of them there are from a variety of sources.) and so moving data to the laptop is... painful. I have to burn 700MB CDs every time I want to move something, so I've just been cramming as much as I can on to CDs to fix this problem. I would like to, in the future, be able to more easily move data to the device without having to use CDs.

So, my general question is simple. Would a PCMCIA card like this work with a pure DOS setup, or would I have to use Windows as a file manager proxy? I do not mind running Windows 95 or even 98 on the system if I have to, I just haven't had a specific reason to so far so it is sitting on a pure DOS 6.22 setup. If it is avoidable to run Windows at all, that would be nice for saving space 😉

Alternatively, are there any storage solution alternatives for a laptop of this age that may work well with transferring files from a modern PC to such an old beast? I do in the future intend on converting the storage to Compact Flash, but even then the drive bay is more of a hassle to access than I would like to have to deal with for frequent file transfers.

Thanks for any responses, hope this sparks a discussion 😁

The Beast 2.0:
CPU: AMD K6-III 450MHz GPU: Nvidia FX 5600 128MB HDD: 20GB (Seagate?) Mobo: ASUS P5A-B RAM: 512MB Sound Card: SB 16 PnP ISA OS: Windows 98 SE

Reply 2 of 3, by BushLin

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The Panasonic USB drivers have worked for me on various Intel chipsets. Not sure about PCMCIA adapters though.
Accessing network shares via DOS is feasible also.

With either of these I'd create a boot menu so the drivers/utilities aren't loaded by default or use a boot CD as required; Hiren's Boot CD 10.6 covers these options and more.

Screw period correct; I wanted a faster system back then. I choose no dropped frames, super fast loading, fully compatible and quiet operation.

Reply 3 of 3, by UltimaPlayer12

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jmarsh wrote:

Get a PCMCIA compactflash adaptor.

I would prefer to not use CF for transferring data to the system, the hard drive itself though will be CF in the future.

BushLin wrote:

The Panasonic USB drivers have worked for me on various Intel chipsets. Not sure about PCMCIA adapters though.
Accessing network shares via DOS is feasible also.

With either of these I'd create a boot menu so the drivers/utilities aren't loaded by default or use a boot CD as required; Hiren's Boot CD 10.6 covers these options and more.

The laptop itself has no native networking, though a PCMCIA network solution may be viable I personally don't intend on investing in one for this system unless I have to at some point in the future. It's something I'll have to think about if I can't get a USB solution going, I suppose.

As for creating a boot menu, I'm planning on ultimately making a very expansive boot menu for the different modes this laptop will end up having to run with the variety of mid-90s and earlier games it'll be playing. That being said, adding options to make sure these drivers aren't loaded when not needed will be trivial 😁

The Beast 2.0:
CPU: AMD K6-III 450MHz GPU: Nvidia FX 5600 128MB HDD: 20GB (Seagate?) Mobo: ASUS P5A-B RAM: 512MB Sound Card: SB 16 PnP ISA OS: Windows 98 SE