It's All in the Cards

PC cards can turn your laptop into everything from a pager to a global positioner

It's 35 degrees outside, with a wind-chill factor of zero. Definitely cold enough -- unless you have to keep hundreds of pounds of food frozen. When a freezer goes out, every second means thousands of dollars' worth of food moves closer to becoming lost inventory.

Steve Kizer is the guy whom Furr's Supermarkets Inc. used to call when its freezers broke. In the old days, the head of service for Alpine Refrigeration, an eight-person dealer in commercial freezers and refrigerators in Midland, Tex., had to rush to the store, often a good distance from his office. A few years ago, Kizer's life got easier and his response time faster -- hours faster in some cases. What happened? Alpine got a computer that could diagnose and sometimes even fix problems over a phone line by resetting or adjusting a freezer's controls through an interactive program. But Kizer still had to run back to his office computer when he was paged.

Then Kizer got a laptop computer with an ActionTec Electronics fax/modem ($119 to $2,808; 800-797-7001). Now he simply plugs into the nearest phone line, calls the freezer's control computer through the modem, determines the problem, and in many cases restores service on-line. "The modem paid for itself the first time I used it," he says. And it saves his customers a lot of money.

Laptop computers are a boon to all types of businesses. They allow service technicians, sales representatives, executives, and other remote or on-the-road professionals to collect and organize data. Of course, having information on hand is great. But even more important is putting that information to work. And PC cards are one way companies are doing that. A PC card is a credit card-size piece of hardware, like Kizer's fax/modem, that fits into a slot inside a computer and adds capabilities such as remote equipment diagnosis and repair. In a laptop, a PC card can add applications that are usually available only on networked desktop models. It can also add mobile applications that cannot run on conventional computers.

When they were developed, in 1989, PC cards were called PCMCIA cards, after the Personal Computer Memory Card International Association. As the name suggests, the cards were designed to add memory to computers. Ironically, the 16-bit bus and slow bus speed of the early cards limit their use as basic memory in today's computers. Due out soon, however, are new cards that use a 32-bit memory bus. The new cards will make it easy to expand a computer's internal memory and may be a good alternative to replacing an internal drive or buying a new computer. But memory is just the beginning. The list of applications for PC cards has grown as their name has shrunk. From the ubiquitous fax/modem to highly specialized cards used only by engineers and technicians, PC cards can add sound, video, high-speed ISDN communications, CD-ROM and scanner compatibility, and more.

Certain cards have more than one function. The most popular combines a fax/modem with an Ethernet adapter and enables users to sign on to an office network whether they're in the office or on the road. And because of their small size and relatively low power consumption, PC cards are well suited to global-positioning-system (GPS) sensors, wireless LANs, cellular modems, pagers, and other wireless applications.

Yet despite their promise, PC cards, though standardized, still have some glitches. For starters, not all cards work easily or even at all with every brand of laptop. And different laptops have different numbers of slots to plug PC cards into, which means that software usually has to be fiddled with to make everything work.

PC cards for laptops come in three thicknesses, all of which fit a 68-pin socket. Type I cards are 3.3 millimeters (1Ú8 inch) thick and are usually used for simple memory expansion. Type II cards, which are 5 millimeters thick (less than 1Ú4 inch), are used for most Ethernet/fax/modem applications. Type III cards, which are 10.5 millimeters thick (slightly over 3Ú8 inch), are used primarily as tiny hard-disk drives.

Because they have so many business applications, PC cards are hot items. The market-research firm Dataquest reports that an estimated 6.9 million cards were sold in 1995 and predicts that sales will jump to almost 30 million by 1999. Some cards cost as little as $40; special-purpose and big flash memory cards can run into the thousands of dollars. Most cards cost between $70 and $400. Users agree that's a small price to pay for the flexibility the cards offer.

Opening Lines of Communication
The most common use for PC cards in laptop computers today is to expand communications -- an application that's particularly important for remote or traveling employees who need to use their office's computer-network services. That makes the most popular PC card the fax/modem card, which acts as a computer's "telephone." Most users now opt for modems that can exchange data at 28.8 kb, though the actual speed depends on the conditions on the phone line as well as the software and capability at the other end.

Virtually all modem cards can send and receive faxes as well as data. Delrina's WinFax Pro Lite (shareware that is included with some modems), a simple version of the most popular fax software, and Microsoft's Windows 95 have both fax and data-communications capability. Fax/modems are more practical for transmitting than receiving faxes: they receive a picture of a page, not the characters on the page, which can be difficult to read on a portable computer screen or in a printout.

The prices of fax/modem cards have dropped rapidly in the last few years. Fast cards (28.8 kb) are available today for less than $200. Most fax/modem cards come with an XJACK phone jack -- pioneered by Megahertz -- that just pops out of the card, and some cards allow a cellular-phone hookup by means of a separate "pigtail" connector.

One dedicated user of the fax/modem is David Lincecum, West Coast sales manager for Electronic Theatre Controls (ETC) Inc., a $40-million company in Middleton, Wis. ETC makes lighting controls and fixtures for theaters, television studios, and concert stages. Lincecum keeps in touch with ETC's main office with a laptop computer containing a 28.8-kb Megahertz fax/modem ($349 to $589; 800-LAPTOPS). "I use fax and E-mail a lot," says the Los Angeles-based sales manager. "I'm constantly on the road, and the computer helps me keep in touch with my own company as well as my clients. It's almost like being there with them."