National Instruments 700 User Manual page 52

PC Card Questions and Answers
3. Is there a way I can conserve power on my PC Card when it is not in use?
Yes. If you are using NI-DAQ for PC compatibles version 4.8.0 or later, a DOS utility called
DAQPOWER_EXE will switch all National Instruments PC Cards between normal mode
and power-down mode. Power-up and power-down icons are also installed for Windows
users to access either of these two power-management modes.
Resources
1. How do I determine if I have a memory conflict?
If no PC Cards are working at all, it is probably because a memory window is not usable.
Card Services uses a 4 KB memory window for its own internal use. If the memory cannot
be used, then Card Services cannot read the Card Information Structure (CIS) from the card's
EPROM, which means it cannot identify cards.
There are two different methods you can use when Card Services has a problem reading the
CIS. First, you can determine which memory window Card Services is using, and then
exclude that window from use by Card Services and/or the memory manager. Second, you
can attempt to determine all of the memory that Card Services can possibly use and then
exclude all but that memory from use by Card Services.
2. How do I determine all of the memory that Card Services can use?
One way to find out which memory addresses Card Services can use is to run a utility such as
MSD.EXE that scans the system and tells you how the system memory is being used. For
example, if you run such a memory utility and it tells you that physical addresses C0000 to
C9FFF are being used for ROM access, then you know that C8000–D3FFF is an invalid
range for Card Services and should be changed to CA000–D3FFF.
3. How can I find usable I/O addresses?
Finding usable I/O addresses is done by trial and error. Of the three resources used—
memory, I/O, interrupts—I/O conflicts will be low. You can use either DAQCONF.EXE in
DOS or WDAQCONF in Windows to diagnose I/O space conflicts. When you have configured
DAQCONF or WDAQCONF for a particular I/O space, save the configuration. If there is a
conflict, the configuration utility will report an error describing the conflict.
4. How do I find usable interrupt levels?
Some utilities, such as MSD.EXE, will scan the system and display information about what is
using hardware interrupts. If you have such a utility, you can run it to determine what
interrupts Card Services can use. Card Services needs an interrupt for itself as well as one
interrupt for each PCMCIA socket in the system. For example, in a system with two
PCMCIA sockets, at least three interrupts should be allocated for use by Card Services.
DAQCard-700 User Manual C-2 © National Instruments Corporation
Appendix C