Technical Notes

PCMCIA Card Warnings

1. Some PCMCIA cards cause the PDA's power to switch off automatically when available battery power drops below a certain level. Power may switch off before the low-battery power message appears on the display. This is done to protect the contents of the PDA. Some uses of PCMCIA cards may cause the power of the PDA's batteries to run down relatively quickly.

   Crashed boot sectors have been reported on some PCMCIA memory cards due to undetected low battery conditions. Some PCMCIA cards may draw power faster than the power detector recognizes. Use of the PCMCIA card in a low-battery state has caused corruption of the PCMCIA boot sector in SOME cases. There are very few reported cases of this. SunDisk, maker of this type of card, has said that only a small number of these cards were distributed by them which were subject to this problem.

   Symptoms: Your Zoomer suddenly shuts down without warning, provocation, or expected timeout.

   You must replace the main batteries in the Zoomer PRIOR to powering up again! Corrupted boot sectors have been successfully recoverable.

   In the unlikely event you are using a SunDisk flash memory card and experience the problem of an unrecognizable card, contact a Casio or Tandy service center, or call SunDisk Technical Support (408-562-3400) for assistance.

2. PCMCIA memory cards must be treated cautiously to avoid loss of data. Just as you would not remove a hard drive or floppy while running an application, you must give the Zoomer the opportunity to close cached or open applications before removing the card.

   If you are only using your PCMCIA memory card as a file backup there are no special considerations. You may insert or remove the card at any time.

   If you open data files on the PCMCIA card from a application, please observe the following:

   • Turn on your Zoomer BEFORE inserting or removing the card.
   • If you insert the card before turning on the Zoomer the file structure on it may not be recognized. The Zoomer will automatically scan the card at time of insertion.
   • To remove the card: Turn on Zoomer. Unseat the card and immediately re-seat it in the slot. Observe the warnings. You will be prompted to close the open and cached applications prior to removing the card. This process may take 30 seconds or more. When complete, you will see an alert box telling you that you may remove the card safely.

   Failure to remove cards in this manner may cause unrecoverable loss of data, mostly due to corruption of the file headers.

3. Other Considerations:
   • If you have a data file which will not open by double-tapping, try opening the application first, then Switch Document to the desired data file.
   • After creating a mirrored directory structure on the PCMCIA card, toggle the PCMCIA Lock switch in order for GEOS to merge the drives/directories together. Example: Create C:\GEOWORKS\WORLD\GAMES and copy a file into it. It will not show up on the File Manager until after toggling the Lock switch.
   • Do NOT create copies of the same data file in parallel file structures on both the PCMCIA card and the internal drive. For example: If you create a \GEOWORKS\DOCUMENT structure on your PCMCIA card, then COPY your "Favorite Restaurants" Notebook to it, then delete one of them. There have been 1 or 2 cases of both copies getting deleted (though we have NOT reproduced it here.). It works fine to copy files to ANOTHER directory, say \BACKUP or to use a different structure on the memory card.
   • In the File Manager, Filenames with underlines indicates that the file is located on another drive.

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