Does the digital wallet work? I see specs, pictures and stuff but does the thing really work. And how frail is it? How often does fatal error' or read/write errors appear. Someone please give me a warm fuzzy feeling that all is well with this machine...

I Just bought a digital wallet (6GIG). I Filled up a 160MB compact flash card twice, dumping it each time into the wallet. It worked perfect. My only problem was installing it on my computer. I have a USB Zip drive. The Wallet and the Zip drive don't like each other at all.

After that, everything worked fine. The wallet softwear went in fine, and the down load went with out a hitch. Any time I want to attach the wallet to my computer, I unplug the zip drive and use the same cable to plug in the Digital Wallet. It is a little pricy, but a lot cheaper than buying compact flash cards. At the resolution that I am using, I could get almost 3,000 pictures into the Wallet..

I've had a Digital Wallet for a long time now and it has been ok. However, I ran into a problem upgrading the driver for the Digital Wallet and their Technical support was unable to come up with a corrective solution. They told me to wait for some possible new driver release and to live with the problem. They were unwilling to repair or replace the Digital Wallet. My recommendation is to look elsewhere. Richard..

What about 2000? XP? Any news from the company about drivers for the newer Windows? No point in buying things that won't work. When o when will the mfrs learn this? Bob..

I just received the 3gb. btw PCMall has a fantastic price on this one. Well, if you are running EasyCdCreator 5, Win2000, you're going to have problems and they don't have a fix. You can only plug the unit in once between reboots. If you plug it in, "eject" it, and plug it in again, the system will crash and reboot. It's a known problem but not high on the priority list since they have had very few calls about this. Other than that, it works fine...

The original digital wallet is being replaced by a new product and the older model will soon be dumped for lower prices, so decide whether you want decent functionality at lower cost or more features and utility in the later product. The new item is called MindStore. It has USB and FireWire connectivity. Supposed to run on all later Windows versions including Win2K and XP. The 5 GB version is supposed to be about US$300 and under normal conditions the battery pack should last about 2 hours...

I have a 3GB Digital Wallet. Initial loading of the drivers was a pain under WindowsME on all of my computers. When it finally loaded (the 6th attempt) it has worked ok. Unfortunately the design of the DW is such that whenever AC power is applied, the drive is running. And to charge the batteries you have to let the drive run for hours. This is not good design and reflects on generally poor engineering choices all the way around.

Engineering decisions seem to have been made by accountants instead of designers. (This isn't Winds@Work but rather Marketing@Work??). The minimalist user-interface does not take full advantage of the microprocessor's capabilities and seems to have been the result of a freshman EE project done in a hurry. With a little more effort the AAA-based NiMH battery pack could have been made so that a wider range of AAA batteries could have been used rather than a proprietary pack which requires that any replacements be purchased at exhorbitant rates, unless you want to solder up your own which is probably not too great a task. The AC adapter is autosensing to allow 110 and 220-VAC to be used, but nobody at Minds@Work could seem to figure out how to get a power cord with any other type of plug than the North American 110VAC type.

I will only use it for secondary backup and not for primary storage, so low is my confidence. Evaluation: One star out of five, thank you...

We have experienced unreliable operation with two units and poor customer service. the advice received was: you should always back up your digital wallet ... (ie admitting it is unreliable.) Newer models may now be better, but cannot yet be recommended. Excellent concept, flawed execution so far. wait and see ....

I recently bought a 20GB Digital Wallet through the MS Passport Holiday promotion, so after I get the $100.00 rebate from MS, the price is about the same as a 1GB IBM Microdrive. My first impressions are similar to the others above - plastic case sort of flimsy in the door areas where the batteries and the PC card adaptor are inserted, need to spin the disk drive to charge batteries, and compatibility problems with the USB interface and/or other hardware on my computer (Win 98 SE). I have not tried the Minds@work tech support yet because I doubt if they would have a solution, and I found a workaround. I have to reboot with the USB cord plugged into the Digital Wallet, then Windows recognizes it and loads the driver. The Digital Wallet steals the drive letter of my CD-ROM drive, but other than that it works fine. With battery power it downloads the 128MB Compact Flash cards and the 1GB Microdrive fairly rapidly, and when connected to the computer it downloads to my hard disk much quicker than the USB CameraMate card reader that I have (the CameraMate steals the drive letters from both my CD-ROM and my CD-RW drive since it has two flash card ports).

So far I like the Digital Wallet even with it's faults, since it is cheaper than a stack of CF cards or IBM Microdrives. The acid test will be how durable it is on an extended trip when I will be carrying the Digital Wallet in a small case on my belt and downloading photo images as the cards fill up, and hoping they can be recovered when I return. If this thread matures and there is interest I will run some timing tests with CF cards and the Microdrive, and report on the field use of the Digital Wallet as well...

I bought the 3Gb Digital Wallet last year... now want to upgrade it to 6 or 10GB but have found not info. I note that it is a 2.5" Toshiba hard drive and wonder if I could just swap out the hard drives for a larger one. Has anyone attempted this? Will it work...