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> I just got thinking: Why do we have to load some silly driver(s) > just to make use of our PCMCIA slots? We don't have to do that for most > cards that get stuck in your desktop ISA/EISA/VLB/PCI slots! No, but you *do* have to set DIP switches or some other kind of soft configuration for these, right? With PCMCIA there's no way to have DIP switches, so instead you load enablers that talk to the pcmcia controller and map devices onto the PC's bus at the specified io/memory/irq locations. Then there are things like hot swap and power management, that aren't an issue with other bus technologies, but which are nice to have with PCMCIA. These require extra software support. Some PCMCIA cards (like modems) are designed to be register compatible with their ISA-bus counterparts, once you get them enabled. Then again there are other cards for which this is not the case. For those cards you need special driver software; the driver that's built into the BIOS (or OS/2 or whatever) isn't sufficient. PCMCIA is actually more general and in some ways more transparent than ISA. Given suitable drivers, you can plug several PCMCIA cards in the bus and not have them conflict with memory, io, or irq addresses -- the enabler software can map all of them to separate spaces. But if you want the PCMCIA cards to be mapped at the same locations as their ISA-bus counterparts, and if you also want to not conflict with any ISA-bus devices already present, it gets a bit tricky. And if you want to allow the user to specify that the PCMCIA modem in slot 2 gets mapped to COM4, well, you're back to adding lines to CONFIG.SYS. Keith Moore