My girlfriend got a new desktop PC to replace her old laptop. She had a 3Com Megahertz PC Card adequate for 100-base-T networking, and my aging (not quite ancient yet) “WallStreet” PowerBook’s built-in ethernet is only 10-base-T. Being a typical Mac user, I’ve never paid much attention to NICs or whether something is “full duplex” or “half duplex” or lives in a monoplex or whatever, but I think this card offers faster ethernet than the built-in.
I check the 3Com site but see no hint of the existence of a Mac driver. Idly, not expecting anything useful or informative to happen, I insert the card into the CardBus slot and I get a PC Card icon on the desktop, labeled with the model number (3CXFE575BT) and with a networking icon (akin to the File Sharing Control Panel) superimposed on it. I do a Get Info on it and the Mac Finder identifies it as a “Network PC Card”. This is considerably more information than I get if I insert my RoadRocket card after booting without the ixmicro extension loaded–that one shows up as a generic PC card with a blank white space for a name in the absence of its driver–so I’m intrigued by this. The Mac seems to recognize this card.
I unclip the ethernet cable from the back and plug it into the x-jack connector of the 3Com card. Try connecting, no dice. Reboot with card in slot, try again. Open TCP and AppleTalk Control Panels, check for new and/or hidden options that might let me specify a different hardware device to use for Ethernet networking. Nope, nothing.
OK, toss me a clue here. Does the fact that the Mac knows the thing is a network card imply that I can get the Mac to use it, or is that misleading?
In the TCP/IP Control Panel there may be an “Alternate Ethernet” option in the Connect To drop down box. That would allow you to override the built-in default networking connection.
That being said, even if the PC Card works, you will not notice any improvement in network performance over the internal connection.
Thanks, Geoduck!
I don’t see any additional items in the “Connect via” drop-down, but I may not have the complete virgin set of extensions and there might have been a “PCMCIA Ethernet” Extension or something like that that I threw out figuring it would never be applicable to me.
Regarding lack of performance improvement, is that because CardBus won’t really support faster networking than I can get from the built-in? Or because 100-base-T / “full duplex” isn’t meaningfully faster anyhow?
Two things brought this up: the girlfriend no longer needing the card, as mentioned above; and, at work, degrading network performance led me to seek out our IT Dept network guru, who said their routers and whatnot were designed to try to force “full duplex” and that my PowerBook’s inherent inability to step up that high was probably creating “collisions” so he would try to change the setting for my line. (I gather that some computers are capable of “full duplex” but will step down with no real reason for doing so, hence his setup that tries to “force” “full duplex” upon them? Something like that…)
Mostly this is a non-pressing question. I would not use the card until and unless Margi Systems releases a MacOS X driver for their display to go card AND unless I can use both cards at the same time. My current second-monitor card is the ixmicro RoadRocket card, which is a Type III card and eats up both slots. I don’t know if the Margi card cares which of the two slots it goes in, and the 3Com card says nothing about it either, but I know some cards (Apple’s DVD decoder card; iRez’s CapSure lo-end video digitizer card) that would physically fit in either are actually picky and demand the bottom slot.
So I just thought I’d see if the option existed, and then if I end up getting the Margi card maybe I’d use the 3Com card at work.
Does your Powerbook have the bronze keyboard and run at 333 MHz? If it does, then I was mistaken, the Cardbus does support 100 BT. But I think I just described the Lombard model.
If you have the older 233-292 MHz models, then those higher speeds are not supported. Just the Apple specs which can be searched on at their website. Oh well, it is still a great laptop.