Absolute Beginner's Guide to Wi-Fi® Wireless Networking

Choosing a Wi-Fi PC Card

Most Windows-compatible laptops come with slots for expansion cards. (I'll show you in detail how these slots, sometimes called expansion slots, work later in this chapter in the section “Installing the Card.”)

These expansion slots are used to add hardware features to a laptop that it doesn't already have built in.

For historical reasons, the cards that fit in the expansion slots are called PCMCIA cards. PCMCIA is short for Personal Computer Memory Card International Association, which is the name of the organization that has devised the standard for cards that can be added to laptops. (You can find out more about PCMCIA at www.pcmcia.org.)

These days PCMCIA cards are commonly called PC Cards. They were originally designed ...