Wireless and 10/100 NIC in one laptop

[thepowerhouse]

Howdy guys, I'm going off to college this fall and the campus has a wireless network in many places but not. So I need a laptop with a regular 10/100nic as well as a wireless card. The dell website won't let me go through with this combination. The rep guy said that the only way to do it would be to use a docking station with a nic built in and use the wireless when the laptop top is not plugged into the docking station.
any comments?

 

[JackMDS]

Usually NIC for laptop comes in a form of PCMCIA card. The Wireless card is around $ 80, the Regular PCMCIA NIC (for CAT5 connection), is around $30.

Get from Dell what make sense (if they charge the same take the Wireless). When necessary you can unplug one and plug the other. In order to make configuration simple; you will need Net switching Software.

http://www.netswitcher.com/

 

[SaigonK]

If you use Windows 2000 this wont matter.
It will detect what you are connected to and when.

I have a Dell CPXj650 with a Cisco 340 wireless card and a Dell 3Com 10/100 card.
The beauty of 2k is when I plugin my lan cable to my 3com it uses that connection, when I unplug and walk over near my wireless router it will connect to it.

If you are using NT or 98 or ME i do not know if this will work for you, but under Windows 2000 it works just fine for me.

Added comments:
under 2k you can disable the connection you are not using so that it wont take effect. Thus if you hook into your campus wireless, just disable the normal 10/100 card and visa versa

 

[Tallgeese]

<< under 2k you can disable the connection you are not using so that it wont take effect. Thus if you hook into your campus wireless, just disable the normal 10/100 card and visa versa >>

Under W9x, you can always disable the appropriate network adapter in &quot;Device Manager&quot; for the same effect.