Digest Articles Re: What's the skinny on card readers? by T.C.Martindale From: "T.C.Martindale" Subject: Re: What's the skinny on card readers? Date: Sat, 03 Jul 1999 20:45:04 PDT MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed -----Original Message----- From: T.C. Martindale To: poqetpc@xxxxxxxx Date: Friday, April 16, 1999 8:58 AM Subject: What's the skinny on card readers? >I'm getting tired of hooking that transfer cable to my Poqet Classic >and have considered buying a parallel-type card reader. Does anyone >know what the cheapest model available is that reads the Poqet SRAM >cards? If they're significantly over $100, I'd be tempted to just >buy a Poqet Plus from CalDigital and leave it hooked up to my desktop >PC all the time to use as a card drive. At least that way I could >swap cards AND have a backup Poqet to boot... > >TC Well, it's been a couple of months, so let me answer my own question. Turns out I did find a parallel-type card reader that would work with Poqet SRAM cards, and for significantly less than $100. In fact, I got two for about $40. In my book, you can't beat that with a stick. I started out with Bryan's FAQ, which mentioned his preference for the Databook Thincard drives. Karby (the people who make it) currently have a model TMD-650 for sale for around $189 or something equally beyond my price range, but I came across one on EBay that was bidding out for around $75 or so. I was sorely tempted, but a search on the words "Databook" or "Thincard" came up with a few other items for sale -- one a Databook TMD-500 and the other a TMD-550. I bid on the 500 and got it for around $10 (with shipping, almost $20). Then I got a response from Bryan that said he didn't know about the 500, he'd been referring to the 550. I didn't want to take any chances, so I bid on that one too and got one of them for $15 (with shipping, $21 total). The two drives are virtually identical -- I couldn't tell you which was which. In fact, the driver software that comes with them says "Databook 500/550", so that tells you something. The drivers are for DOS/Windows; Win95 and Win98 are supposed to have a PCMCIA Wizard that will install the correct drivers from CAB files on the CD, but I couldn't locate the wizard on my machine to save my life. So I installed the DOS/Windows drivers from disk, they made changes to the config.sys and autoexec.bat, and viola, I've now got a D: that accesses my 2meg Poqet cards. Sweet! The guy I got the TMD-550 from still has a few of these drives (I just noticed two more up for auction as I'm writing this), so if you're interested, drop by Ebay (www.ebay.com, of course) and take a gander. TC