Laptop PCMCIA ports not recognized.

[GeorgeMU]

I have a Prostar 8500/8250 laptop, 466 Celeron, and it doesn't recognize the PCMCIA ports. Tried Win 98SE and Win 2000 with no luck, PCMCIA doesn't show up in device manager and doesn't recognize any installed PCMCIA cards. Could this be a motherboard problem?

 

[Luke727]

You might try here. On my Inspiron 5000, I have to use special drivers to make use of PCMCIA cards, but Windows 2000 comes with drivers for it built in. On that page I didn't see any Windows 2000 drivers for your PCMCIA ports....in fact, they don't have any PCMCIA drivers for any of their models. If Windows 2000 really doesn't recognize it, you should contact pro-star's tech support. There might be special directions to get it to work right. On a side note, their 8593 model is cool. It beats my laptop that I got in July 2000 for $3000. I wasn't aware that anyone made laptop video cards with video capture support. That's cool.

 

[corkyg]

Make sure you are using the right PC cards. PCMCIA (a.k.a. PC Card) has two basic categories . . . the original PCMCIA and Cardbus. One is a 16 bit and the other 32. The slots are normally backward compatible, but a 16 bit slot cannot "see" a cardbus device.

Some laptops have one of each type. Sometimes these slots can be turned on and off in BIOS, and if OFF, Windows will never see them.

You can always try real mode PCMCIA drivers. If those produce nothing, then chances are the problem is hardware and not your OS.

If you have Cardbus (32 bit) slots, and Windows is up and running, you will not "see" anything unless it is inserted in a slot. An empty slot doesn't show. Hot plugging is always a good way to try and force the issue. You get one beep code for recognition and another for removal.

 

[Boethius]

I have a Dell Inspiron 3800 with the same problem. However, you may want to open up your computer and see if the pc-card slot has physically come off the motherboard. That is how I solved it, it should just click right back in again.