[NTLK] Newton Compact Flash - Battery Life, Alternative storage methods?

[Gavin Watson]

I only used the 8 GB card for a few days before I traded, so I'm not 
sure about the battery life difference. As for adapters, I use a generic 
$9 PCMCIA CompactFlash adapter I bought at a local electronics store. As 
I understand it, these CF adapters passively route the pins from the 
PCMCIA interface to the ATA interface on the CF card, so they shouldn't 
use any extra power at all. That said, a CF card that runs only at 5V 
and not 3.3V might draw more power. I use rechargeable 2000 mAh AAs in a 
battery tray and usually get 3-4 weeks on a charge with just my CF card 
and occasionally a Wi-Fi card in use.

I just use folders for sorting packages on Newton OS 2. One nice thing 
about NOS is that it doesn't care where you put packages. If you have a 
bunch of extensions, for example, you can separate them into several 
other folders and the system will find them just fine. If I have a 
package that I rarely use, I'll freeze it with the button provided by 
Power Prefs or a similar utility and file it in my 'Frozen' folder.

On 07/04/2012 08:57 PM, William Maloney wrote:
> Using something smaller was my thought too. I tried to persuade the guy at
> the Best Buy that 4GB was far too much but again, twas all they had. It
> worked but again, painfully slow. A bit much for this old Newt. Doing a
> swap seems like a great idea. Someone will inevitably get a very good deal!
> :)
>
> By the way, did you notice any marked improvement with battery life using a
> smaller card? I tried fiddling with the power settings but couldn't manage
> to get it down. This card ate through double AAs much faster than
> anticipated. Does having a different CF PC-card adapter have anything to do
> with it?
>
> A third question also -- when NewtonOS2 has quite a few packages on, are
> there any programs or shells you use to help manage that much data? Having
> to scroll through the extras box becomes a tad monotonous when dealing with
> package after package.
>
> On Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 12:30 AM, Gavin Watson <gavin83209 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> A couple of years ago, I bought a 266x 8 GB CF card with the intention
>> of using it in my Newton, but it was painfully slow. After a bit of
>> research, I traded the 8 GB card for the 50x 512 MB card in a friend's
>> camera. The 512 MB card is probably ten times faster and more stable in
>> my MP2100 and I still don't even have 30 MB of data on the card. It
>> still isn't quite as fast as linear flash, but it's at least comparable.
>> If you can find one, try a CF card in the 128-512 MB range and see if it
>> helps.
>>
>> For battery life, there is an option in ATA Support Preferences to put
>> the card to sleep after a certain delay. Try 10 seconds or something
>> similar if you aren't already. Unlike MicroDrives, CF cards don't have
>> any moving parts, so they take almost no time to come out of sleep mode.
>>
>>