Opinion?

[mikey07]

Ok, here's the questions guys. A USB cd rom drive or a PCMCIA cd rom drive. The laptops that i fix don't have any cd rom drives. And I need to boot from a cd. Which one do i need to access all the laptops, USB or PCMCIA?

 

[ShoobieRat]

Personally, I didn't know it was possible to boot from a USB device, at least not on all laptops. I would check that out first.

If you can, you'd have to base your decision on how fast you can get a PCMCIA card. USB 2.0 runs at 480mb/s. The more money you pump into a PCMCIA card (assuming you have a slot that can handle the same speeds) you can get a very fast PCMCIA card, which can potentially be faster than the USB connection.

If you have one of those external laptop CD-ROM drives, just use that.

I hope you don't have a lot of these laptops...or yer gonna be hurt'n. If that's the case, I'd be more inclined to buy a laptop HDD imager than fool around individually.

 

[Apokalipse]

I'm not sure if you can use a PCMCIA card out of Windows, but I know some BIOS's support the use of USB devices before it loads Windows
check the BIOS to see if it has any options on USB

 

[mikey07]

appreciate it guys.