Docking Station with an ISA slot - Dell D420

I have a Dell D420 laptop, souped up with an mSATA SSD and maxed out memory (2,5GB), which I use for some old hardware (a distortion analyser) that uses a 16-bit PCMCIA card. I can't get more modern than this - though it is a cracking laptop - because they go to ExpressCard after this. It runs XP on one partition and, believe it or not, Win 10 on another. The Win 10 works pretty OK for what it is, but more than say 3 or 4 tabs in Chrome and it starts to struggle. It's worth having the Win 10 because it's familiar, but I wouldn't say you can run Win 10 on a D420.

I also have some other old hardware that uses an ISA slot and it occured to me that there might be an older docking station that has one. I know there is a DS (the PD01X) which is compatible with a lot of the Dell laptops and has a PCI slot, and I was wondering if an earlier version might have had an ISA slot? Since the D420 is fine with a 16 bit PCMCIA, and they are pretty much the same thing, it may well support it. And it would be a very neat way to get some backward compatibility. And it would be lightning fast since this hardware originally ran on 386es with 8MB of RAM!

Was anyone here an IT buyer back in the early 2000s and may remember the D420 - and perhaps have put them on an older docking station? And clever you if you did buy a D420 or D430, it's a great piece of kit for its time. I have an i5 E6230, which is a more modern version of the same thing, and I don't think it hits the spot in the same way the D420 does. It's actually larger and heavier than the D420.

Thanks in advance.

 

ISA, lol, that stuff disappeared long before even the original D600 came out, 2004-ish. ISA slots pretty much disappeared when the Intel i810 chipset took over from the i440BX on the desktop.

Find a pin-out of the D-Dock to verify, but I doubt it contains even the basic hardware to support ISA bus stuff. A PCI to ISA bridge is about as good as you can probably do. But if you're gonna have all that sort of mess, why not just a normal ATX PC?

BTW, my Latitude D830 has a PCMCIA slot. ExpressCard definitely was on some later models. You can put 8gb into a D830 if you can find the 4gb DDR2 SODIMMS (they cost a lot when you can find 'em!). I have a D630 kicking around here, it'll also take 8gb DDR2, and I think it has a PCMCIA slot as well. The E6400 additionally still has PCMCIA. Although I'm suspicious as to whether the newer PCMCIA slots would actually work under DOS as pure AT-bus-addressable slots, or if there's some sort of abstraction layer inbetween them that requires drivers (that are most certainly unavailable!).

 

(Off-topic)

IIRC by then ISA mostly disappeared from consumer machines, but was still widely used in industrial computers.

 

I doubt anyone was engineering anything new in ISA-format after 1996-1997 when it was pretty clear that PCI had won the next generation bus battle. Legacy stuff, sure....