Hi,

Am typing this on a 13 year old IBM Thinkpad X41 1.5Ghz Pentium laptop running peppermint. Its wonderful, everything just works . It's had the HDD replaced with SSD and is running a full 1.5Gb or RAM, but its great.The standard spec includes wifi, bluetooth and audio/in out sockets

This model of laptop includes a PCMCIA slot, currently empty

So my question is what *could* I use this slot for ? Everything I need works without it, so network cards are not needed. I have working sound on-board, maybe a PCMCIA sound card would free up cpu resource when watching videos ?

Were there any PCMCIA cards which might boost performance in some way ? secondary processors ? Floating point maths ?

Back in my early days I recall there were PCMCIA RAM cards which simply increased the system memory of a laptop, is there any merit in exploring this ?

A rather broad question, but interested in what, if anything I could use the empty PCMCIA slot for ?


Any suggestions much appreciated

Why not scroll through the list and be inspired? https://www.amazon.com/pcmcia-card/s?k=pcmcia+card

An adapter to CF cards, perhaps? Or sata?


Of course, there's also an adapter converter for your Mercedes Benz SLK55AMG S Class!

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you Jan K,

That's a useful link. I'm sorry, I should have been a bit more specific. I think I have enough storage and the X41 also has a useful slot for SD cards which I use. I was interested in the more obscure PCMCIA cards which might possibly improve some aspect of the laptops performance, and whether Linux would be able to exploit them ? I'm pretty sure at one time you could get system memory in PCMCIA format for example ?

USB...

I purchased a USB 3.0 card from Delock for this slot on a Thinkpad T500. One of the possibles, perhaps for a USB 3 external HDD.

I played with IBM laptops a long time ago. IBM may have been one of the better supported pcmcia slots in linux but there are a few things going on. One is the slot tends to be on a bridge device like a pci to pci bridge. Two is the types and speeds they offered. Three would be the actual support for the card. A nic may still require a driver if not in distro.
Pcmcia was only popular for a short time. They did make almost every type of gizmo that one could get on a regular bus.

I disabled the internal wireless g card on one Dell laptop and used a wireless N pmcia un t;s place.

In another. I used the pcmcia slot to upgrade usb port to 2.0 from 1.1 speeds and also a mini firewire port for a camera hookup
cable that was provided.

https://www.newegg.com/p/0XM-000G-00002

https://ppa-usa.com/computer-product...e-cardbus.html

Examples above are what I purchased long ago on the cheap before rarity kicked in and price hikes were/are common.

I usually try keep and keep these kinds of things under the 10 dollar limit

Thank you all for the input, interesting. I am following an Echo Indigo sound card on ebay, I wondered if using that rather than the onboard might free up some resource ?

I also found this interesting site with some of the more unusual PCMCIA devices, all long gone by the look of things. However his last comment resonated with me. Maybe the best thing to do is to open the hatch on the slot and simply use the space as an airflow route for cooling. The fan does kick in quite a bit with this old machine

https://www.ohgizmo.com/5-ways-to-us...-pc-card-slot/

On the slot is the same resources I'd think unless the card has hardware acceleration (doubt it).

A dedicated usb device like Line 6 would be needed but it will still show up as latency and usb resources.

The PCMCIA slot in my IBM ThinkPad G40 is occupied by a D-Link b, n standard wifi card which works amazingly well with Linux Mint v 19.3 XFCE 32 bit.
It was a $3K business class laptop in its day back in 2004 which is an eternity for computers.
It has a 3 GHz P4 desktop CPU and is maxed out at 2 GB RAM.
Still runs pretty good for a long in the tooth laptop.

Apologies for not getting back to you on this. I appreciate the input and in the end I've left the slot empty. My plan had been to get a plastic insert , drill some holes in the end and use the slot for cooling. I bought the wrong one, got it half in and couldn't get it out. Eventually I managed and this has left the slot door jammed open. It's actually a serendipitous solution as I think getting as much air through this laptop is a good thing.

Thanks for the suggestions

I blogged it with some pics here:http://mr-ives.blogspot.com/2020/07/...ld-laptop.html