Whats the difference between PCMCIA/Cardbus/Type II/III etc?

[Crimson]

Just picked up a new laptop, well, its not new, but its new to me.. Can someone explain to me the difference between what all these mean? The laptop I picked up is a couple years old, a 266mhz CPU.. According to the instructions, it supports:

"Two Type II or one Type III PC Card Slot, Zoom Video, Card bus"

Any idea what that means? I am looking to pick up a PCMCIA network adapter for it, I see some listed as Type II, others as 32bit, others as Cardbus, what does this all mean, and what I should prefer?

 

[AndyHui]

The PC Card standard involves 3 card sizes and 2 different types of cards.

Type I, Type II and Type III all refer to the physical size of the card. Most PC Card cards are Type II, such as modems, sound cards, network cards, CF adapters, that sort of thing. Type III cards are exactly twice the height of the Type II card, and are generally PC Card hard drives, or such cards as the Xircom Realport cards.

In most laptops, the PC Card slots come as two Type II card slots stacked on top of each other, so you can insert either up to 2 Type II or 1 Type III.

The second item that you have to be aware of is two different card types: the older PCMCIA 16-bit 5 volt ISA standard, and the newer CardBus 32-bit 3.3 volt PCI standard. In other words, PCMCIA cards are ISA cards using the ISA bus, while CardBus cards are PCI cards using the PCI bus. You will find that just about all laptops that are Pentium MMX or later, will be CardBus type slots. CardBus cards have a notched metal plate at the interface end of the cards and cannot be inserted into the older PCMCIA slots, but PCMCIA cards can be inserted into CardBus slots.

Generally, very slim laptops do not provide the standard double-decker Type II slot, and only give you a single Type II slot, preventing you from using Type III cards.

Zoomed Video is a PC Card standard used for video capture, with some very AGP like concepts. However, it is not commonly used. You can find out more about ZV here.

Given that you have a 266MHz CPU, I would probably recommend you getting a 32-bit CardBus NIC.