PC Card Drivers (Windows CE 5.0)
The PC Card host stack in Microsoft® Windows® CE 5.0 includes support for 16-bit and 32-bit PC Cards. The PCMCIA driver in earlier versions of Windows CE provides support only for 16-bit drivers. Although this driver has been deprecated, legacy PCMCIA drivers will continue to function correctly due to a legacy compatibility layer built into the Windows CE 5.0 driver stack. For more information, see PCMCIA Legacy Compatibility Layer Architecture.
Note A legacy PCMCIA client driver is one that was created prior to Windows CE 5.0 that supports only 16-bit PCMCIA cards. A PC Card driver is one that was created in Windows CE 5.0 that supports both 16 and 32-bit PCMCIA cards and was written using the bus-agnostic driver model. For more information, see PC Card Bus-Agnostic Client Drivers.
Microsoft recommends that you convert legacy PCMCIA drivers to bus-agnostic drivers to take advantages of the improvements over the previous driver:
- Works on any bus driver designed to support the bus-agnostic model
- Sockets are isolated from one another
- Suspend, resume, and remove requests are handled more effectively
- Only one driver must be maintained in order to support PCI, PC Card, and local bus implementations of the same hardware
- The new driver is more stable than the legacy PCMCIA driver and helps protect against system crashes
In This Section
- PC Card Development Concepts
Explains the basic development concepts for PC Card drivers and describes the PC Card architecture. - PC Card Driver Samples
Provides the location for PC Card driver samples. - PC Card Driver Reference
Provides reference information for PC Card drivers.
Related Sections
- Power Management
Describes the power management capabilities provided by the Windows CE OS.
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