Ethernet Card Shootout

Ethernet is normally used to connect many personal computers together, allowing them to communicate and share information. But it can work with as few as two computers if each has an Ethernet adapter (or port). With Ethernet capability, a user can connect his or her PC Companion to a desktop PC and transfer or synchronize data at much higher rates (10 megabits per second). Inexpensive Ethernet adapters are available for desktop PCs. In fact, more and more desktop PCs are coming with Ethernet adapters built in. Ethernet adapters for Windows PC Companions come in PC Card or CompactFlash Card formats.

The user slips the Ethernet card into the appropriate card slot on the PC Companion and then connects it to any point in the network. (For more information about Ethernet, see Chris' article on  the Jan/Feb 99 issue.)

With this users have the ability to connect their PC Companion to their desktop PCs via a network card, enabling data transfer and synchronize at much higher rates (10 megabits per second). To accomplish this, the PC Companion needs an Ethernet adapter, which comes in PC Card or CompactFlash Card formats. The user slips the Ethernet card into the appropriate card slot on the PC Companion and then connects it to any point in the network.

For an Ethernet card to be recognized by a PC Companion the user must first install a software driver for the card. Drivers are small software programs that "teach" a computer how to recognize and communicate with a specific peripheral - in this case the Ethernet card. Microsoft has developed a generic NE-2000 software driver for these cards. It ships with every PC Companion and is found on the ActiveSync (Windows CE Services) CD that comes with each PC Companion. Note: The H/PC Pros have the NE-2000 driver in ROM. The 2.11 P/PCs do not have an NE-2000 driver and the version on the CD is not compatible. Right now Pretec's CompactLAN card does not provide 2.11 drivers. Most of the cards I tested used this generic driver. But some came with custom drivers developed by the card manufacturer. These tended to have more features than Microsoft's generic driver and the cards easier to use (see below).

Similar performance with all cards tested

I conducted performance tests on a variety of Ethernet cards, using an H/PC Pro (Hewlett-Packard's Jornada 680) and a Palm-size PC (Casio's E-105). I used the Ethernet cards to connect them to my Pentium 233 MHz Windows 95 desktop PC, with no other devices attached to the desktop's hub. I found that synchronizing a 4 MB file via an Ethernet connection is over 15 times faster than using the serial port, regardless of the brand of Ethernet card being used. Further, synchronizing the data file was even faster when I used the Network Client which allows a user to access a network shared hard drive to copy the exact same file to the PC Companion using Ethernet. However, as fast as a Windows CE Ethernet connection is, Ethernet does not seem to perform to its maximum potential speed on Windows CE devices. The drivers are not optimized for threading, etc., like Win 95/98/NT drivers.