After a tripping over incident with the laptop network cable the clip on the existing network card in the laptop has knackered and refuses to hold a cable any more.

After looking at pcworld (small mortgage required) and an independant computer shop in town (smaller mortgage required) it seems the best price i can find for a net one is about £35 which seems excessive.

Can anyone point me in the direction (dabs and insight have confused me with their pages and pages of choice!) of a more reasonably priced one?

Thanks

David

might be able to help you there

think i have a dlink dfe 670txd around, its the one with the hard connected port

if i have (its new, ditched laptop)

£25inc

lmk

Hi David.

NetGear make decent, low cost network cards.

USB 2.0 10/100 Adapter for £28.20 inc. Obviously you'd need a spare USB port on your laptop.

Carbus 10/100 PCMCIA Card NIC is £31.72 inc.

If your notebook is very old, it won't support the Cardbus NIC above, so go for the older FA-411

HTH,

Chris.

[Edited by ChrisB - 10/27/2003 9:20:35 PM]

Cheers for the reply guys, is this the right sorta thing...

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/produ...duct_uid=40459

Should be fine on a laptop that's upto three or four years old (Cardbus support is the thing to check).

Chris.

Cheers Chris :)

In fact i need two of them:

1 laptop is an AMD 1.8ghz about a year old and the other one is a sony vaio 500mhz with 64mb of ram and both running xp. Is there any way to check for cardbus support?

David

In fact, the USB approach appeals, do you have any experience with this sort of adapter or know of any issues?

David

I have, steer well clear!!!!

I have tried about 5 different usb net adapters, in both flavours wired and wireless and have had agro with the lot. I believe that it's down to the bandwidth of USB not being able to cope with it.

Having said that I'd be tempted to try a USB 2.0 as IMHO I don't believe it will suffer the same. However only very modern computers have USB 2.0 ports so check the state of yours.

BTW, the tripping over the cable thing I have done too many times, just be thankfull they got those silly plug in adapter things that rip out and that it weren't your notebook strewn accross the floor!!!

It's also very worth considering wireless networking, these aren't really gonna be anymore expensive these days. Though, if you are planning to link it to other computers you'll need an access point as well, otherwise you can go "ad-hoc" and 2 (or more) computers will network wireless without the need for the AP.