[Duo2400] Re: PCMICA with the New Little G4 PowerBook

[Ivan Drucker]

>	5. PCMCIA HD card 89MB and a 174MB card which I use as emergency drive
>	6. IBM Travelstar 8E replaced with 20GB HD

>	both of these now can be replace with Firewire external if I wanted

As far as emergency drive goes, let's not forget that these new machines 
have an optical drive. It's more reliable to carry a boot CD (which you 
could always get from a computer store in a pinch) than an emergency boot 
drive. Also, I keep (on my iBook) a small partition with an emergency 
system folder and utilities if starting up fails for some reason. (Of 
course, I can't always select it if the computer isn't starting up, but 
it can be done with some Open Firmware trickery, and I think if it were 
the first partition it would be the default after zapping PRAM.) This 
strategy may not work as well if I don't have 9 available, but still...

For storage, I have a nice little bus-powered 20 GB FireWire drive now, I 
just took the drive out of my PCMCIA enclosure and put it in a $27 
FireWire enclosure (superpcparts.com). MUCH faster.

>	7. Road Rocket card

12" G4 supports dual monitors natively, no hack needed. You do need a 
dongle, but I guess that the Road Rocket does too.

>	I thought I had other PC card but this was all so I see no reason to
>have a PC card slot now.

That was the conclusion I came to -- the only time I want my PC Card slot 
is for things like Wireless WAN (not 802.11) like a GPRS card. If anyone 
ever really deploys a true wireless-anywhere internet solution, it will 
probably require a card like this, but perhaps someone will come out with 
a USB module too. Any other "new" technology which comes out on a PC card 
card would be an issue as well.

>	Ralp Mawyer you talked about a SCSI to Firewire converter I haven't
>seen any info on those. I have 2 different USB/SCSI converter would be
>interested in a Firewire/SCSI converter.

I too was interested in this but I found that actually I have zero need 
for my SCSI devices any more. Zip's I just don't need anymore. CD 
burners, I mean what I've got now is so much faster, and they're cheap. 
Once you've used FireWire and USB, SCSI just seems like the biggest pain.

Ivan.