ViennaMedia
01-24-2010, 05:31 AM
I got lucky and had access to a 4 year laptop with XP Professional loaded.
There may be other Windows XP machines around you that will provide a P2 card offloader.
What I found in a closet was a HP Compaq nx6325 put out in 2006. 64bit dual-core AMD processor. But, what made it work was that it has a 6-in-1 card reader (MS, Pro, SD, MMC, xD, SM).
That's where I discovered that my P2 card fit.
I installed the Panasonic Driver for the File Manager utility at their website mentioned in the forums here.
I definitely Write-Protected the P2 cards with the external pin switch before inserting them. If I inserted a card it would be recognized as an external device immediately.
If I was going to remove the P2 I did a device eject first and confirmed its removal as a mounted drive.
The only drawback to storing internally is a 60 g hard drive on this model. I only had about 38 gigs of free space on this model I used for my test.
Of course I could offload to an external drive instead of the internal drive. This laptop has a Firewire 800 port. But I first wanted to test the CardBus to internal hard drive speed in the transfer operation. It was fast. I didn't put the stopwatch to it but my impression was it copied the P2 files in a third of the time of USB 2.0 from the camera. Definitely comparable to the Duel Adapter to MacPro laptop method I had been using before Snow Leopard OS X.
It was the multi-format card reader installed on the side that made this Windows machine P2 transfer possible without any adapter.
So, you should look around for older Windows machines with the card reader -- they may be completely free to you or be considered giveaways to someone who will take it.
The reviewer whose post I read from 2006 said his machine lasted 4 hours and 26 minutes on battery. I only use this one with a power adapter.
I was able to transfer the files at over a gig per minute using the Ethernet cable method back to a Mac.
I fired up Final Cut and the files are perfect.
As Barry Green has suggested you should use the Panasonic utility downloadable at their website for managing P2 files because it will verify the files it copies and even perform little fixes on the fly. I only used the P2 Card Manager utility that I installed on the Windows machine.
There may be other Windows XP machines around you that will provide a P2 card offloader.
What I found in a closet was a HP Compaq nx6325 put out in 2006. 64bit dual-core AMD processor. But, what made it work was that it has a 6-in-1 card reader (MS, Pro, SD, MMC, xD, SM).
That's where I discovered that my P2 card fit.
I installed the Panasonic Driver for the File Manager utility at their website mentioned in the forums here.
I definitely Write-Protected the P2 cards with the external pin switch before inserting them. If I inserted a card it would be recognized as an external device immediately.
If I was going to remove the P2 I did a device eject first and confirmed its removal as a mounted drive.
The only drawback to storing internally is a 60 g hard drive on this model. I only had about 38 gigs of free space on this model I used for my test.
Of course I could offload to an external drive instead of the internal drive. This laptop has a Firewire 800 port. But I first wanted to test the CardBus to internal hard drive speed in the transfer operation. It was fast. I didn't put the stopwatch to it but my impression was it copied the P2 files in a third of the time of USB 2.0 from the camera. Definitely comparable to the Duel Adapter to MacPro laptop method I had been using before Snow Leopard OS X.
It was the multi-format card reader installed on the side that made this Windows machine P2 transfer possible without any adapter.
So, you should look around for older Windows machines with the card reader -- they may be completely free to you or be considered giveaways to someone who will take it.
The reviewer whose post I read from 2006 said his machine lasted 4 hours and 26 minutes on battery. I only use this one with a power adapter.
I was able to transfer the files at over a gig per minute using the Ethernet cable method back to a Mac.
I fired up Final Cut and the files are perfect.
As Barry Green has suggested you should use the Panasonic utility downloadable at their website for managing P2 files because it will verify the files it copies and even perform little fixes on the fly. I only used the P2 Card Manager utility that I installed on the Windows machine.