Solved Floppy drive to USB 2.0

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Brandon Byrnes

PCHF Member
Jan 3, 2017
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Hello everyone. I have an OLD Dell Inspiron 2650 laptop, which only has USB 1.1 ports. It has a floppy drive which I would like to remove and replace with USB 2.0 ports. Is this possible? And if so how do I do it and can you provide me with the links to the hardware i will need to buy, preferably off of Amazon? I can't use the pcmia for the usb 2.0 because i am using that for the wifi card. I know everyone is probably saying why bother with this old outdated crappy laptop but, its fun to work with and I'm just going to use it for downloading and basic stuff. And I don't mind putting ALITTLE money into it, for example the pcmia wifi card was only $7.00. So any help would be appreciated thank You.
 
The port is on the mother board so putting anything else in the bay wont give you usb 2
 
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So these are hard to find parts. My suggestion is get the PCMCIA 2 port usb adapter and use one port for downloading and the other for an usb wifi setup.
 
vger said:
So these are hard to find parts. My suggestion is get the PCMCIA 2 port usb adapter and use one port for downloading and the other for an usb wifi setup.
Click to expand...
Yeah I should have thought of that before buying the pcmia wifi card, I guess i will do that now. While Im here I have another question. Windows XP is saying there is 256mb of ram installed but when I open the bottom of the laptop I only see one 128mb dimm. So I figured the other dimm was under it, so I removed it and under the dimm was a sticker that says DIMM B but there is no dimm underneath it. So could the dimm be located somewhere else on the motherboard? Aren't they usually next to each other or one on top of the other?
 
Brandon Byrnes said:
when I open the bottom of the laptop I only see one 128mb dimm.
Click to expand...
Does it state 128 MB? Where are you seeing the 256 MG you may be seeing the Swap File size.
Brandon Byrnes said:
So I figured the other dimm was under it, so I removed it and under the dimm was a sticker that says DIMM B but there is no dimm underneath it.
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Correct that is the place it would of been and if it is not there then there is no other.
 
Rustys said:
Does it state 128 MB? Where are you seeing the 256 MG you may be seeing the Swap File size.

When I go Into the system information where it displays System Information about what version of Windows, what type of processor, and how much RAM. It states in there that there is 256mb.
Click to expand...
 
Rustys said:
Does it state 128 MB? Where are you seeing the 256 MG you may be seeing the Swap File size.

Correct that is the place it would of been and if it is not there then there is no other.
Click to expand...
Okay so after a little research i just found out that only one slot is accessible for user upgrade the other slot is located under the keyboard and is supposedly only accessable by a Dell Service technician. Well we'll see about that ;-)
 
Rustys said:
Looks as it is under the keyboard and is removable just opposite side of the other SODIMM.
Click to expand...
okay so i found it. Now my question is I have decided to upgrade the memory but only by 256MB so i will have 256MB and 128MB DIMMs in it, does it matter which slot each one is in. I am thinking the 256MB one should go in slot one and the 128MB should go in slot two, am I right?
 
In personal experience it is best to get RAM in pairs. Some system have fits some times (not immediately) if they are not paired properly.

Why not max out the RAM to what that system can handle?
 
Why not max out the RAM to what that system can handle?
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Because I'm cheap LOL, and I wan't to see how it does with the RAM i got for it first before i buy another DIMM, if there is an improvement then I'll buy another 256MB DIMM, I think I can only max it out at 512MBs. Plus it doesn't help that the HDD is IDE and only 4700 RPM. And its actually kind of expensive the upgrade the HDD the cheapest 40Gb IDE 5400 HDD i could find was 20 bucks. Since this is a crap laptop that i don't want to put a ton of money into I don't think I want to spend that much on a HDD.
 
Also I'm not even sure I bought the right kind of module, the module that is in the laptop is 128MB DDR PC2100 CL2.5. I bought a 256MB PC2100 DDR CL2.5 so I'm pretty sure it's the right one. Also the module in the laptop is Samsung, so I bought a Samsung module, it cost me about $5.50 for one module off of Amazon.
 
Well, I've pretty much given up on this crappy laptop it was fun to work on but it's just way too slow to do anything. Thanks everyone for the help, this is closed.
 
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