Patrick’s Rants

My brother bought a Toshiba Portege from someone for $100. He’s going to use it to edit his eBay items because his desk is a little cramped.

The thing is it came without the external CDRom drive that probably once existed for it. It has a modem jack, a jack for an external monitor, 2 pcmcia slots, a jack for a keyboard and USB port. Notice there wasn’t a printer port or a serial port mentioned. I didn’t forget, they aren’t there. The wireless card that came with it doesn’t have any drivers installed on the laptop.
To get his information from the laptop to his desktop machine he bought a USB bridge. The thing is he can’t load the drivers or software for it. So here we have a classic catch 22: he can’t load the drivers without connecting to the network and he can’t connect to the network without the drivers.

I hammered away at this thing for over a day trying to get a generic driver to load and get things moving… yeah right, that might work in Linux, but XP refuses to load drivers that way. I finally had a flash of brilliance (if I do say so myself) and tried getting the IR (infrared) port working on the thing. The problem is that I couldn’t - or at least couldn’t figure out if it was working - get the IR port on my Slackware laptop to work. That’s something for another day at this point.

My solution was to take it into the office where a Win 2k laptop was waiting to experiment with. Setting this up is really easy. Windows has direct connections built in - used to be you had to install the software separately - and all you have to do is go into your network connections, add a new connection using the advanced options and select the IR port. You have to decide which machine will be the “host” and which will be the “guest”. The host will contain the files that you want to copy, etc. In my case the “office laptop” served as the host. Once the machines could see each other I shared the CDRom of the office laptop and installed the USB bridge software using the wireless link.

The idea was to get the Xircom wireless card working… except that it’s too old and the drivers are for 9x versions of Windows. So for the time being he is going to just do his work on the laptop and transfer the files over with the drag and drop (which worked well) software that came with the USB bridge.

The USB bridge can be found more cheaply if you search the online computer stores, but not all are USB 2.0 which the one from Radio Shack happens to be.

As a PS, I got a wireless network card that I will have to find an Access Point to see if I can get it working with the Slackware laptop