There is no point in taking apart the laptop! There is no NIC board available that will plug into the mboard itself like the 56K modem does! I said that in the last sentence! PCMIA is a standard - it doesn't look like anything. You get a PC Card NIC card - a larger modular card inside its own enclosure, not anything like a card you install inside the computer like you do in a desktop computer- and you stick in the slot - the large CARDBUS Slot - it adheres to the PCMIA standard. See the manual I pointed you to. There is no point in taking apart the laptop! Your laptop is ancient and it is very different from recent laptops that have wireless NIC's and other things inside them!

0

Hey, I already had it apart when I started the post and now it is back together and working perfectly. I needed to look inside to find ALL the hardware makes and models, so I know when I load linux on it. I was also curious to see the cyrix cpu and its socket mount, furthermore I cleaned the fan while I was in there. I do have a pcmcia slot in there. Are all pcmcia slots the same 16 bit speed? Or could this one be even less 8bit? I am really curious to find a card that has an ethernet jack 10 mbits/s is good and possibly one usb jack 1.1 or 2.0 all on the same card, is this possible?

0

Tubes and wires This is the motherboard http://partsurfer.hp.com/cgi-bin/spi/showphoto?partnumber=203731-001 I am pretty sure that a combination card is not viable but I just had to ask cause the type 2 cards support 10mbits/s nics so usb 1.1 is not that far off. The links your posted are quite useful thanks! I live in Canada, you know of any sites that might sell this stuff as paying to get it across the boarder sucks. In one your posts http://developer.novell.com/yes/38438.htm this is the exact computer, but what is with the cardbus thing, I thought that cardbus was a step up from pcmcia which is ISA and cardbus is pci? I just need to find a nic that has a chipset set that is well supported under linux. Thanks for all the help so far.

0

The standard that a Carbus slot uses is PCMIA. Anything that is made to plug into that cardbus slot is PCMIA compatible. There are at least 2 version standards of cardbus slots, maybe more. Your laptop can use a 10/100mbps PC Card NIC, or PCMIA NIC adapter if you prefer to call it that, but 10mbps is fine for the internet. As far as I know, any of them will work with Linux, but I'm no expert regarding laptops/notebooks. There are lots of Linux related sites where you can check that out. You don't have to use Linux. Win 95 will run fine on it as is, Win 95 cd's are easy to get - most people will give them away if they still have one, because most have versions of Win 95 that only support hard drives up to 8.4 gb, using FAT instead of FAT32. Win 98/98SE/ME will run on it, but you should have an absolute minimum of 64mb of ram or it will be really pokey. The mystery here is which version of CARDBUS slot the laptop uses. Some PC Card NIC's are compatible with the earlier standard, some with the later one - a newer PC card may be backward compatible with the older standard, but I don't know for sure. If you talk to someone who knows about old laptops, they can probably tell you where you might find a new or used PC Card NIC that will work in your laptop, and what cardbus slot version it uses. You could try this site - (Edmonton, Alberta) - he does answer his email if you send him one. New and used Laptops, but also desktops and computer pieces, maybe older laptop pieces. http://www.mrlaptop.net/ Canada/Edmonton links http://buyitcanada.com/Edmonton/Computers/index.html This guy has some older stuff but he may not be so good at answering his email (Edmonton): http://www.creartec.com/ Computers Canada - Canadian search engine - find it in Canada http://www.computers-canada.com/

0

Thanks T&W's you have been quite helpful. I will try the following links you gave. I just didn't know much about laptops cause noone I knew had one let alone one I could play with. I know have a couple but this has only been for 3 months. So I need to do a lot of catching up. Appreciate the help.

0

Also on these sites it says it supports two cards but when I look in the slot it has only one 64 pin interface, I think.

0

"...one usb jack 1.1 or 2.0 all on the same card, is this possible?" If you have room for only 1 PCMIA card, you can't use both an NIC and USB at the same time. You can get USB 2.0 PCMIA controller cards with up to at least 4 ports, and they always also are supposed to support USB 1.x, but that backwards support is not 100%, and I'm not sure they will work in the cardbus slot version you have. There are lot of things that won't work connected to a USB hub - e.g. mice and keyboards usually will; printers, scanners, usually won't.

0

A friend gave me a Compaq Presario 1220 that hadn't been used in 4 years (cyrix cpu and 80 mb of RAM, bottom says series 2940A). The computer came with a Netgear FA410 ethernet card but unfortunately the "dongle" was lost. I installed win98se because I wanted to attach it to my home LAN and bought a repotec 32 bit 3.3 volts ethernet card. However, the presario does not see it at all (no beep, no plug n play, no nothing). Same with a USB2 - firewire combo I have. It does see the FA410 card but refuses to install the 98 drivers I downloaded from the compaq website. I imagine however the FA410 card worked in the original win95. Am I missing smt about PC CARDS? Do I have only a 16 bit interface?

0