Not sure about your laptop, but with mine it is ok. Just as long as you use that lil application to "safely remove hardware". I have a PCMCIA cd-rom and it let me plug it in and take it out ... it even made a bleeping noise like when USB devices are installed and removed.

Thx for the info, gal.
I was asking for a friend and wasn't sure. Didn't want him "frying" a brand new laptop on my advice, hee hee.

Donk
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I didn't wanna give you wrong advice, so I did about a minute and a half of research on the net and found out that PCMCIA cards are hot swappable. However, this depends upon the operating system you're using. DOS, etc aren't ... while most newer versions of Windows as well as Linux are.

yeah. Windows seems to be all pissy about taking them out while "in use". It really doesn't matter that much since they're plug-and-play devices.

It's weird ... my old Linux system handles usb stuff better than WinXP does (I think). I'm using a wireless usb mouse and (wired) usb keyboard on my linux box with no problems - auto-detected and configured

I used to have a problem installing RedHat 7.2 on my laptop w/ a PCMCIA cd-rom tho. It took a bit of research to figure out there was a switch I needed to type in for RedHat's installer to read from pcmcia drives.