PCCard pins shorting PCMCIA port?

[ever90321]

I am an administrator at a small business, and trying to understand
why we have several laptops with unusable PCCard ports. We own two
Sprint air cards that are available to employees on request: a Sierra
Wireless AC595 and a Pantech PC-500. The Sierra recently stopped
working, but it's more a plug-and-play issue than a radio issue. It's
not recognized by the laptops anymore, and appears as a "PCMCIA
MTD-0002" instead. In trying to solve the problem, I've noticed the
laptops are now not accepting the Pantech either, creating the same
error. A WiFi router that doesn't take the Sierra's form factor still
works fine with the Pantech, so I know it's good.

Just today I saw something I hadn't noticed before. In the lower-right
corner of the Sierra (looking straight-on at the female edge), the
plastic appears worn away between what I believe are pins 35 and 36, a
ground and "card detect 1". Now I'm technically inclined, but am no
engineer... Is it feasible this could have caused a short in the
PCCard ports of any laptop that's recently tried the Sierra, thereby
causing all other cards to fail? Is there any easy method for testing
the PCCard port pinouts?

We are working through the issue with the manufacturer, and there are
still zillions of things to try, but I wanted to get some feedback on
my current sinking feeling... Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Todd

 

[Quaoar]

(e-mail address removed) wrote:

....

You will find that many of the users of these cards do not use the card
ejection tab, but simply pull it out; this is fatal to many, if not
most, PC-Cards. Much as a company car that is used and abused by many
drivers and deteriorates rapidly, a single PC-Card shared among users is
destined to fail from user abuse.

Q

 

[ever90321]

(e-mail address removed) wrote:

...

You will find that many of the users of these cards do not use the card
ejection tab, but simply pull it out; this is fatal to many, if not
most, PC-Cards. Much as a company car that is used and abused by many
drivers and deteriorates rapidly, a single PC-Card shared among users is
destined to fail from user abuse.

Thanks for the advice. I've never needed/used a laptop regularly, and
the fragility of the card edge hadn't occurred to me until now. (From
a hardware perspective, my only thought was to check for bent/broken
pins inside the laptop.) I suppose nobody designs a connector that
relieves stress on the card edge?

Todd

 

[tanhksss]

Few week ago I bought a pcmcia LAN for my laptop.
Need to push in pull out every day because laptop can't put into the
carrying bag if don't pull out the LAN card.
Today I find that this LAN is not working, push in a wifi card and it
works, so must be the LAN card spoilt.

Could it be because I forgot to soft-disconnect before pulling out the
LAN card that spoilt it.