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Problem with Dell Inspiron 2650 cardbus controller

  • 05-06-2003 10:17pm
    #1
    talla
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,617 ✭✭✭


    Im posting this warning to anybody who has purchased a Dell Inspiron 2650(It may be other laptops also but this is in specific relation to a Dell 2650) which uses the O2 Micro PCMCIA cardbus controller. The Manufacturer O2 micro have supposedly admitted that there is an issue with cardbus and have released a fix(I cannot find any mention of this on their website) but Dell refuse to admit there is a problem. My own issue that I had can be seen here .


    Basically this will affect anyone who wishes to use a PCMCIA card that supports USB 2.0 or Firewire, so devices like external hard disks, External CDRW drives and DVDRW drives are unusable with Dell Inspirons that use this O2 cardbus controller. I spent many an email battle with Dell support trying to resolve this issue but they continuosly insisted the problem was with my PCMCIA card manufacturer. I've even discovered issues relating to this on the Microsoft knowledge base and thought it may have been a problem with windows as Microsoft assumed it was, also there are mentions of this on the Western Digital Knowledge base but both Microsoft and Western Digital had no idea what was causing this problem.


    Anyway while browsing the official dell forums I came across countless posts regarding issues and several of them mentioned that the problem was with the cardbus controller see here for an example of this issue or here in this very long thread(just posting this so Boards can cover themselves and me), but if you do any search of the Dell forums for O2 Micro you will find plenty of threads on this. Anyway, I downloaded a fix from here, takes 30 seconds to install and finally I have a working Extrnal hard disk after nearly 3 months. I hope this is of help and a warning to any Dell laptop users.


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