Overgrown laptop

[cdbeckman]

I have a PCI sound card that I use for recording, but I want to be able to use it in many places. is there anyway to get a laptop that would support PCI cards? thanks

-cdbeckman

 

[mikecel79]

Not without a docking station that allows you to add PCI cards too. We used to have one for an old Micron Laptop at work. I wouldn't call the docking station portable though since it weighed about 5 lbs.

 

[ai42]

Not without a docking station that allows you to add PCI cards too. We used to have one for an old Micron Laptop at work. I wouldn't call the docking station portable though since it weighed about 5 lbs.

5lbs isnt portable? My superlsim 1inch thick laptops weights 4.3 lbs? Anyway docking stations with PCI slots are extremely rare. Just get a SoundBlaster Xtigy that runs through USB ports which is a heck of a lot easier to find.

 

[mikecel79]

I should have mentioned this was without the power supply and it's a very awkward shape (about 6" tall, 12" wide and 6" deep) and won't fit in a bag easily. If you had to carry that and the laptop around your looking at almost 10-12 lbs worth of stuff to carry.

 

[dkozloski]

It sounds like the old days when they would put a monitor with a CRT in the same case as a desktop PC, bolt a handle on it, and call it a portable.

 

[c0rv1d43]

Yah. I had one of those. A Panasonic Sr. Parter. It had a 10" green CRT, a FULL-sized keyboard (not those teensy things they call full-sized nowadays), a 10 meg hard drive, a 5.25" floppy drive, AND (drum roll) a thermal printer -- all built into one easy-to-carry 40 pound package! It also had a couple of slots that would take full-sized cards built into the chassis. I managed to stuff a "hardcard" (hard drive on a card) into one of the slots. The card was massive. There were LOTS of desktop systems back then that would not have accommodated it.



More to the point of the thread -- I can't think of any recent notebook / laptop that can take a PCI card. Some of the old orange plasma screen Toshibas could do it. You might want to look for a lunch box portable. Many of those can take cards, though the internal dimensions of most, if not all, of these computers would preclude use of a really long card.

- Collin