Content area
Full Text
Once, portables were a second machine, but with faster processors and wonderful active matrix color monitors, the portable computer is now, for many, the only machine. And users are demanding much more from their network PC Cards.
We tested 19 of them, and those that did well were ones with a complete package of services. 3Com, Farallon, Xircom and Megahertz offered the top cards, all with good performance, good operating system support and good documentation. The 3Com card was the top performer, with an average of 776 Kbps and a maximum rate of 845 Kbps using Novell's Perform3. The Farallon card performed almost as well and featured a unique repeater module that lets you daisy-chain up to seven devices from one 10BASE-T drop.
The Xircom card did well in the performance test and has excellent operating system and driver support. The Megahertz card also scored well with its easy-to-use installation package.
Just below the top performers were Kingston, Thomas Conrad, IBM, Olicom, Cardwell, Silicom and Centennial. At the bottom were GVC, Linksys, New Media, Apex, Boca, TDK and D-Link, some of which had notable qualities, but were usually just repackaged cards with no value added except for low price.
3Com 3C589
When you dominate the Ethernet LAN adapter market like 3Com does, it tends to be pervasive, and the 3C589 is no exception. The 3C589 had the top numbers in both our Perform3 and DOS file copy test. A good selection of drivers for DOS and OS/2 ODI and NDIS 2.0, and a very easy-to-use and reliable configuration and diagnostic utility make this the card to beat. The 3C589 is also one of only a few cards that support Novell 3.12 and 4.1 server drivers. The entire package is first rate ranging from the manual to technical support to the lifetime warranty.
The 3C589 is ideal for anyone who wants high performance and reliability, but it's not suitable for those who want to run a network analyzer program, since the 3C589's parallel-tasking architecture discards packets at the hardware level, and will never notify the upper-layer protocols of any bad packets. However, this allows the card to be extremely efficient and fast. With a list price of $288, it's not the cheapest, but it's certainly...