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

[William Maloney]

Anyone know if SD cards are compatible and if so, the battery life with
those?

On Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 1:58 AM, Gavin Watson <gavin83209 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
> >>
> >>
>
>
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