Re: update:pcmcia ethernet recommendation
On Fri, 23 Mar 2001, Donnie Jones wrote:
> I found this card on www.shopper.com
>
> LINKSYS ETHERFAST 10/100
> PCCARD NETWORK CARD
> Price Per Unit: $39.99
> Mnfr. Part #:PCMPC100
>
> www.egghead.com/category/inv/00035336/03279569.htm
> That's the link for the card.
>
> Please let me know if anyone has heard of problems
> with this pcmcia card, or success, thanks again to
> all...
I had such a card and I had three beefs with it:
* on some 10Mbps half-duplex networks performance was *very* bad. A
typical example is the network on which I was unable to get more than a
200kb/s (yes, 200 kilobits/second), while everyone else was routinely
able to achieve >8Mb/s. That was from another machine on the LAN and
very surprisingly it was faster to download things from the internet (so
presumably talking to some router on the LAN). I had no problem on my
home network though!
* I bought it because it supports 100Mb/s in full-duplex and my home
network supports it through and through. But it's a 16bit card so i was
never able to get past 10-12Mb/s. That's pretty frustrating.
* I broke the dongle. It's the usual story: the cable got stuck
somewhere, the cord pulled hard on the dongle, and now, although nothing
looks broken, the card does not work anymore (unless I push hard
downward on the dongle while I try to use the laptop with the other
hand). Since then I read that this model has a reputation of having a
rather fragile dongle.
I have also used 3c589 cards and I never had any performance problem
with them (including on the network mentioned above). One of them has a
dongle that has ben beaten up pretty badly multiple times and is all out
of shape. But it still works. Not the bad side: if I unplug the RJ-45 it
thinks it switches to BNC mode and I have to eject/reinsert it to get my
network connection back. But that may be a driver bug (2.4.0test9).
Actually I'm still looking for a replacement for my PCMPC100.
Currenly I'm looking for a _32bits_ 10/100Mb/s card. Maybe one of the
net 3coms with an XJack. But these are really much more expensive :-/
--
Francois Gouget fgouget@free.fr http://fgouget.free.fr/
1 + e ^ ( i * pi ) = 0
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