SystemSoft Delivers PC Card Drivers for NT 4.0 Thomas Sullivan

ENT, Feb 4, 1998

Given that PC Cards are an integral part of any notebook user's business life, and with NT 4.0's lack of PC Card driv-ers, one might wonder why IT managers don't just abandon the platform for notebooks altogether for one that works with PC Cards. "Especially in large corporations, where they've got a sales force and other outside workers, MIS wants to keep uniformity among all its workers, so they use NT on notebooks as well as the desktops," explains Andy Prophet, AP Research (Cupertino, Calif.), a market analysis firm.

SystemSoft (Natick, Mass.) has developed a solution to the missing driver problem. CardWizard V3.1, which has received the Microsoft Designed for Windows NT logo, is a software program that enables users to add PC Card plug-and-play capability to Windows NT 4.0 machines. This includes notebooks but is not limited to mobile devices.

The lack of drivers causes the same problems when PC Cards are used with desktop systems and a PC Card reader. In the case of Garco Building Systems (Spokane, Wash.), this became a real problem.

The company uses a digital camera daily to capture images of building supply loads it sends out, which are temporarily stored on CompactFlash PC Cards. From there, the digital images are transferred to Windows NT 4.0 desktops via a PC Card reader. "We preconstruct buildings and ship them out piece by piece, so we use the camera to take pictures as a matter of record, prior to sending out each shipment," says Dennis Wood, Garco's IT manager.

Although Garco doesn't actually use notebooks for this process, the procedures -- and, therefore, the problems -- are exactly the same. "We had to reboot every time we switched cards, and that was an unacceptable waste of time. That's why I brought in SystemSoft," says Wood.

To combat this wasted time, Garco installed SystemSoft's CardWizard V3.1. "Now, with CardWizard V3.1, we no longer have to reboot with every PC Card switch, which is the way it should be," says Wood.

The only hang-up Wood found is the usual conflict with the Service Pack installation process. "Microsoft let me know beforehand that if I needed to reload [Service Pack] 3, I'd have to reload CardWizard as well," says Wood.

Until now, CardWizard was available only to OEMs. However, the software now can be purchased and downloaded from SystemSoft's Web site at www. systemsoft.com.

Garco implemented CardWizard to be used with memory cards, but NT's lack of drivers inhibits hot-swapping of all types of PC Cards. "There's a growing need for finding PC Card drivers for NT, and SystemSoft has addressed this need," says AP Research's Prophet. "This is a hole in NT that needed to be filled for the OS to work effectively on notebooks or with PC Cards."