It must be noted that there are some limitations with the standard PC Card driver for Windows NT. The driver (pcmcia.sys) does not provide for dynamic resource allocation and "Hot Insertion" of PC Cards. (Insertion while the PC is running.) For some applications, such as Wireless LAN the card is inserted before boot anyway. However, if the card is removed at any time, this can lead to operating system crashes.

There are also other restrictions when using the standard drivers that can lead to an unusable system; for instance, the PC Card ATA disk driver (atdisk.sys) requires exclusive use of IRQ9, unfortunately on some motherboards, IRQ9 is allocated to another device, and this can lead to the OS failing to boot when an ATA drive is inserted. Also the PC Card driver cannot always cope when the Elcard PCIBridge adapter is inserted in a motherboard slot that is behind a PCI to PCI bridge (not on PCI bus number 0).

Elcard has tested SystemSoft CardWizard (a third party card and socket services package) and found that it resolves the above problems and limitations, and for this reason, Elcard recommends that CardWizard is installed on systems running Windows NT4 (see http://www.systemsoft.com for more information and http://www.systemsoft.com/special/evaluation for an evaluation version.)