You also could try getting a docking station for the laptop if one is available with a parallel port on it, as most of those talk directly to the PCI/PCI-E bus rather than PCMCIA - I managed to get one for my laptop recently for 15quid off of ebay.
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Also have a look at your laptop's BIOS manual and disable any power saving, S3 suspend etc. settings it has and then do the same in Windows. Oh and of course only run the thing on mains power (apologies if that's teaching you to suck eggs).........