A Portable Drive Is The Answer

Sydney Morning Herald

Monday September 4, 1995

BY TONY SARNO

MOST notebooks do not have CD-ROM drives, a crippling shortcoming as more and more software comes out on CD-ROM disks. Installing Windows 95 and Microsoft Office on a notebook computer without a CD-ROM drive is a 40-plus floppy-disk nightmare.

This is where a portable CD-ROM drive can be very useful. There are now several on the market, looking like slightly oversized versions of ordinary audio CD players. But plug them into your laptop's PC Card slot (formerly known as PCMCIA), and, as if by magic, you can run Cinemania 95, or Mech Warrior II.

The drawback is that you don't get any sound from them for PC applications, since you need to have a sound card installed (unless you play an Audio CD, in which case you can listen to it with headphones that plug into the sides of the portable drives).

Again, most notebooks don't have sound cards, but you can also get around that with a portable sound system, like Media Vision's. Plug a portable CD-ROM and a portable sound card into your notebook's two slots, and you have notebook multimedia system, assuming you can get it to work.

We tested two double-speed portable CD-ROM drives, from Panasonic, and Media Vision, but other companies, such as Zenith also sell them.

Being portable, the drives tend to spare you the agony and frustration that comes with installing an internal CD-ROM drive, but they're still not exactly plug and play. Connecting any peripheral into an IBM compatible, particularly into a PCMCIA slot, can be a pain, so you must be prepared to do some fiddling. Panasonic's $699 KXL-D720 CD-ROM player is the easier of the two to set up, purely because it's a no-frills player with one setup disk.

We connected it to our Toshiba Satellite T2130CT via the PC Card slot, installed the software from the disk (which adds the necessary drivers and makes changes to the autoexec.bat and config.sys files), rebooted, and it worked first time.

With a transfer rate of 300 Kb a second and an access time of 295 milliseconds, it ran Cinemania 95 and a couple of games as smoothly as any double-speed drive. We also installed it on a new Sharp notebook and it just refused to run. There appeared to be a problem with the Phoenix card and socket services software on the Sharp.

Without the luxury of hours to spend with configuration files or on the phone to tech support, we aborted the experiment.

The Panasonic is more compact than the Media Vision unit, and runs off six AA batteries.

The $699 Media Vision Reno MV-500 portable CD-ROM drive attaches to a rechargeable battery dock, though when mated together, both are still quite portable.

On top of a SCSI-2 PCMCIA adapter card, it comes with its own card-manager software (in case yours needs updating), a SCSI utility program from Corel that lets you access, test and maintain SCSI devices, and stereo headphones. Its Quick Steps manual is superb and takes you step by step through the installation process.

The Reno CD-ROM drive has an access speed of 306 Kb a second, and an access time of 180ms and, as with the Panasonic drive, Cinemania and the rest ran flawlessly, if silently, off it.

Like the Panasonic drive, the Media Vision does not provide sound. This is where Media Vision's $445 PCMCIA MVS-045 portable sound system comes in, to turn a portable into a multimedia mach ine.

Essentially, it's a Sound Blaster-compatible, portable 16-bit sound card with exactly the same functionality as Media Vision's desktop sound cards, but you install it through a Type II PC Card slot much like the portable CD-ROM drives.