Wireless Internet Card
If you have a laptop and you want to connect to the internet via “hotspots” like at the coffee shop or at the airport, your computer should have a wireless internet card installed. Most wireless laptops these days come with a built in wireless internet card as part of the motherboard, so no additional hardware is needed. But if you’re like a lot of people and have a notebook without this equipment, you’ll need to buy it before you can do any web browsing or emailing without an Ethernet cable. Luckily for you, there are many models to choose from of wireless cards for laptops with an antenna built in.

One popular manufacturer of wireless internet cards is Linksys. This company offers several different kinds of wireless adapters that can be plugged into different slots in your laptop. The WPC300N Wireless-N Notebook adapter and the WPC 4400N Wireless-N Business Notebook Adapter both slide into your PCMCIA slot, which is a large rectangular opening in the side of most laptops that have been built in the last ten years. Another adapter, the WUSB300N Wireless-N USB Network Adapter, plugs into the laptop’s USB port, which is another option if you don’t have any free PCMCIA slots. Although this is a slower solution, the difference in speed isn’t great enough to have much of an effect on tasks such as web browsing or email. An intriguing new type of wireless internet card is the WCF54G Wireless Compact Flash. This adapter slides into the laptop’s Compact Flash slot, which is normally used to CFC’s that come out of a peripheral such as a digital camera. Special drivers are installed that tell the operating system to recognize the device in the flash drive as a network adapter.

For owners of laptops that don’t have wireless connections, cheap wireless internet cards for laptops can be found at most major electronics and computer retailers, and online as well. They can be very inexpensive, depending on which options are included in with the hardware. So if you do a lot of mobile computing, it is worth it to go out and get one so you can take advantage of all the free wireless access points at hotels, coffee shops, and other places.