firewire

I bought this card for my Dell laptop and new 20GB iPod. I pulled it out of the box, put it into the PCI slot on the side of my laptop, and my computer located it without a problem. I was up and running immediately. Transfers to my iPod are incredibly fast. I highly recommend this very low-maintenance Firewire card.

I bought this card to be able to use an Apple iPod with my Windows 2000 laptop. If you are running Windows 2000 or XP, your laptop will immediately recognize this card and install all necessary drivers. Within 10 minutes of plugging in this card, I had hooked up my iPod and transferred my entire music collection to it.

Some people are rating this card down incorrecty. To set the matter straight:

The PCMCIA bus specification does not provide enough power to allow the PCMCIA cards to power external devices. Therefore, the PCMCIA Firewire cards do not provide enough power to the Firewire bus.

NO PCMCIA firewire cards can charge an ipod by itself (using the laptop's battery). PCI firewire cards (the kind for you desktop) CAN, but PCMCIA cards (the ones for you laptop) CANNOT. It is not a "feature" that this card lacks.

HOWEVER: Some PCMCIA cards come with an input for an external power adaptor, including this Startech card (as another reviewer mentioned). So basically, you plug an external adapter into the port (which you can see in the picture) and the external adapter will then power the firewire card, letting it charge your ipod. As far as I can tell, this feature isn't available on a lot of cheaper models. But you WILL have to have an external power adapter to use this feature.

So again, NO PCMCIA cards can self power an ipod while charging. Don't rate a product down for something that's not possible.