Today is Monday and being such the city, at least most of it, is still on vacation in lieu of saturday being News Years and all. I managed to wake up at 10:30am today. I promised a friend (Lisa) that I'd help her back up her computer today. Actually it's a laptop based on a pentium II with no USB ports. Originally I was going to use my trusty PCMCIA adapdter to copy everything onto a few compact flash cards. Her drive is only 2 gigabytes.
The problem is that the hard drive is pretty full and windows 95 is starting to crash more frequently. Upgrading her to 98 is possible but we don't have any of the original CDs that came with the laptop to get any of the IBM drivers. I'll have to check the web site. The solution ended up being a parallel port compact flash reader which I picked up for under $20.00. (Lisa if you're reading this I really don't want you paying for this). It works like a charm. I managed to back up about 200 megs. Mostly old email.
That was pretty much my day today. From 12 to 12, trying to read a PCMCIA card that wouldn't work to going off to a sale that I saw last week during boxing day, back to her place, then back to the store. Turns out one of the pins was bent in the first drive I picked up. Then back to her place. They should use compact flash as a floppy drive replacement (IMHO)
The first time I used a compact flash was for my now outdated Psion 5. What a great little PDA it is. You can program it, it has a keyboard and a touch screen, it multitasks, and takes two AA batteries, with a CR-2032 lithium watch battery as a backup (so you don't lose anything when changing the AAs). It's like a palm only bigger and geekier.
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