BarryK, O Honored sir, I humbly greet thee and my heart doth sing...
I bought this Thinkpad, used, from a Seattle computer shop about 2 years ago. It is a Pentium-III Coppermine 800 MHz in the standard factory configuration, that is, 256MB of RAM, 20GB hard disk. Main chipset is Intel BX so hard disk speed is only UDMA2 (33MBps). A nice machine, I like it a lot, except the hard disk failed about a month after I bought it. Fortunately IBM's warranty was transferrable and it was still within the warranty period so I got a new one free.
It isn't a PCMCIA modem, rather it is inside the laptop, on the laptop's mini-PCI expansion slot. I don't know whether the modem half of the Xircom combo card is a true hardware modem or not, but probably not; Windows 98SE Device Manager calls it a "Xircom MPCI+ Modem 56 WinGlobal." Its NIC chipset is 3Com 82557. I've never used the modem side of it, since I surf through a dedicated proxy server (sitting beside my desk), through the network card side of it, over a 192Kbps ADSL connection.
The Thinkpad T21 has one each on the rear, of the following:
PS2 jack
USB 1.1 jack
100BaseT CAT-5 network jack
phone line jack for the modem
external monitor jack
parallel jack
9-pin D-connector serial jack
...and another jack looking sort of like the PS2 connector but with the alignment slot horizontal not vertical, which I forget what it is.
On the left side is a 2-slot PCMCIA connector.
I am able to boot either Puppy 1.0.8 or Puppy 2 alpha 0.0.3 from a USB key (a.k.a. "jump drive"), when vmlinuz and the other files are loaded onto the key (it is a SanDisk Cruzer Mini 2GB), when the key is plugged directly into the rear USB 1.1 jack, booting via grub.exe called in c:\autoexec.bat--in short, "Boot Puppy 2 alpha 0.0.3 from disk" is a menu choice in my regular Windows 98SE config.sys. The T21's BIOS is too old to support direct booting from a USB device.
When Puppy 1.0.8 is on the key I can also boot from pakt's WakeUSB floppy. The boot2pup and wakepup floppies however do not work.
When Puppy 2 alpha 0.0.3 is on the key I can boot from grub.exe on hard disk but not from the WakeUSB floppy, even when the WakeUSB floppy's autoexec.bat is edited to adjust for the difference in names of the ramdisk image et cetera.
What I am ideally after is to be able to plug the SanDisk into a USB 2.0 Cardbus adapter (Hewlett-Packard PM453A) which then in turn plugs into the Thinkpad's PCMCIA slot. USB 2.0 is about 8 times faster than USB 1.1 in real-world use. Doing so should make Puppy boot on this laptop in something like 15 seconds, not the 1:45 (for Puppy 2a 0.0.3) or 2:40 (for Puppy 1.0.
that it now takes to boot from the USB key, using grub.exe, when the key is plugged into the Thinkpad's rear USB 1.1 jack.
Pakt has mentioned, elsewhere, that he owns a similar, possibly identical, 2-port USB 2.0 adapter card which fits into the PCMCIA port on his laptop, and so I am hoping he will be curious enough to work with it and adapt WakeUSB and/or the Puppy kernel to enable the booting of Puppy from USB key through this adapter.
Incidentally, for comparison, it takes 47 seconds to boot Puppy 2 alpha 0.0.3 when the files are on the hard disk, using grub.exe.
The Logitech cordless mouse is several years old, bought at a PC salvage shop, and its receiver has a USB 1.1 plug. I can't stand the Trackpoint device and have been using this Logitech mouse for about a year now. Since I only bought the Hewlett-Packard USB 2.0 PCMCIA Cardbus adapter a few days ago, until last Wednesday I had only a single USB jack --a notorious shortcoming of these early T-series Thinkpads. Therefore in order to use both my Logitech cordless mouse and any other USB device, such as my printer or the SanDisk, without resorting to a hub, I'm plugging the Logitech mouse's receiver in through a USB-to-PS2 adapter, into the PS2 port. This adapter is so common (and easily breakable) that I carry a few around with me as spares, it costs U.S. $3 at my local computer shop.
I also just found out the hard way, that it is not a good idea to unplug the USB-to-PS2 adapter from the PS2 port while Puppy 2 is running. Doing so loses the mouse and I don't know how to exit the joe window manager without the mouse. Therefore I had to depress the power button, therefore losing pup_save.3fs, therefore having to set up Puppy 2 alpha 0.0.3 with the network proxy data from scratch. Which is why it took so long to post this reply!