Micro Solutions 24X Dual Port Bantam Backpack Reader for Win95/98/NT

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Product from MicroSoft
Review: Fast, light weight, as usual, great product from MicroSoft.
Just plug and you are running the backpack, Great for PC or Laptops.

Rating:
Summary: Works, high quality drivers, good compatibility
Review: This product is not from Microsoft, it's from Micro Solutions.

I have owned this product for several years and used it a lot. It's one of the best computing investments I've ever made. They've been selling this drive for several years, it's unusual for a company to support something that long these days. It works fine for me on a variety of computers. The drivers install easily and it works. I have run it on Win95, Win98, Win98SE, and WinNT 4.0 and it worked on all of them. You can tell that the Micro Solutions people are paying attention to engineering their driver correctly because all of the Backpack products use the same driver. That means the Micro Solutions people are not cloning their code, they are using the same code all the time and that cuts down on bugs and makes it possible to get the bugs out. They release updated drivers regularly. I've never had this device cause any of my systems to crash.

You can use this device with the printer port, which is great for portability, but it also comes with a PC card for use with the Notebook computer for better performance. Both printer port and PC card work for me.

It's useful to get a spare power adapter so that you can leave one plugged in both at home and the office so you don't have to get on your knees everytime you want to transport the drive. Also Micro Solutions has an inexpensive adapter available that will allow you to use the drive with a USB port. I don't have that, but given the quality of the rest of the package I have high confidence.

Addition: I now have the USB adapter and my confidence was justified. The adapter works fine. By the way, Micro Solutions also makes available free of charge their own CD recording software, called SpeedyCD. That, too, works fine for me.
A fine company.