Lincecum plugs his computer into phone lines at home, in hotels, in customers' offices, and at airports. For example, he often downloads his E-mail messages before boarding a plane, prepares responses in flight, and uploads his replies when he lands. "It saves me hours of time every week," he says.
Lincecum also uses his laptop to retrieve software and presentations from the factory and to operate his office desktop computer. He can do anything from outside the office that he can do in it. The only drawback: The display of information on the screen of his laptop can be slow.
The theater expert also finds his laptop and modem are good company when he travels because they give him access to theater news via the Internet. "It's like a community," he says, adding that he enjoys Web surfing from hotel rooms. "It beats watching TV."
Sharing gathered information is another important application PC cards offer. John Peszek knew that he needed to automate Mortgage Bancorp Services, his 15-person mortgage-brokerage business, so he bought the laptop computers and specialized software that his staff needed in order to enter vital data in the field. So all that information could be shared after it was entered, he turned to Ethernet PC cards and EtherLink III network adapters from 3Com ($125 to $549; 800-NET3COM), which link the laptops to the Palatine, Ill., company's Novell network. The cards serve the same function as the larger Ethernet cards installed in the company's desktop computers and servers: they transfer data transparently at up to 10 megabits per second.
Like Megahertz fax/modem cards, some Ethernet PC cards come with pop-out connectors for the telephone: Type 10BASE-T modular connectors are common in Ethernet networks, while a pigtail connector is sometimes needed for the BNC connectors in other networks. Ethernet cards typically cost $200 to $400 and are manufactured by a number of companies, including Xircom, the market leader.
Keeping in touch is a two-way process. Not only do travelers have to contact their companies; their companies have to stay in touch with them. Pagers and cellular phones allow that, but they can be annoying and intrusive at times. The O.J. Simpson trial, for example, was enough of a circus without beeping pagers and ringing cellular phones interrupting the proceedings. So Judge Lance Ito, like most of his colleagues, banned their use in court. How did famed trial lawyer F. Lee Bailey stay in touch with the outside world? The Socket PageCard (from Socket Communications, $350 to $400, plus a monthly service fee of $19.95; 800-552-3300), a pager on a PC card that can be used by itself with a small internal screen or in a laptop computer. When it's plugged into a computer, a message window pops up whenever a message is received. "It's been extremely useful," says Bailey, who had never used a pager before the Simpson trial. "I'd recommend it to any trial lawyer. Judges usually permit computers in court, and it allows lawyers to receive their messages without disrupting the proceedings."
Once data are gathered and shared, they must be kept safe. Copying a hard drive directly to a floppy disk or magnetic tape is the standard way to back up files. But some users prefer to transfer information to Type I memory cards. Type III cards, which contain a tiny, 1.8-inch hard-disk drive, are a more expensive but very effective way to protect critical information.
After losing vital data to a disk failure, Kenn Miller, a franchised real-estate broker for RE/MAX Central, in Denver, now faithfully copies data from his laptop's internal disk drive to a 340-MB PC-card disk drive from Integral Peripherals ($500; 303-449-8009).
Another approach to backing up critical data is the flash memory card, which contains a type of semiconductor memory that can store information indefinitely without power. This kind of card is still quite expensive -- around $1,500 for 40 MB -- but the price per megabyte is dropping, and capacity is growing rapidly. Other users employ a SCSI (small computer-system interface) PC card to connect their computers to external tape drives or removable-cartridge disk drives.
Text-based information is much more common today than other types of information, but the capture and transmission of graphics are growing. Burr Oak Tool and Gauge, a Sturgis, Mich., company that builds production equipment for the manufacture of air-conditioning and heating products, uses photographs in its instruction manuals. At one time, advertising director Art Oswald had to take photographs, have the film developed, and then scan slides to get digital images for the company's documents. With Quadrant International's video- and image-capture CardCAM-VideoIN ($399; 800-700-0362), Oswald found he could take pictures with a camcorder, connect the camcorder to the PC card in his computer, and create files for use in the company's technical manuals and instruction books. "This really cut the time and effort required," says Oswald. "It was easy to use the camcorder, and the software for the card was excellent."
The Quadrant card can also capture moving images, but saving them takes a lot of disk space. Cards from other suppliers such as New Media ($179 to $499; 800-CARDS4U) can turn portable PCs into multimedia players, adding audio and video and providing a SCSI for CD-ROM drives and other external peripherals.
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Going Wireless
PC cards not only give laptop computers desktop capabilities but also turn them into mobile communication centers by allowing local-area- or even wide-area-network wireless communications.
Modern Technologies Inc. was just waiting for wireless LAN adapters. The 26-person Atlanta-based consulting firm helps companies in the insurance and health fields hold "electronic" meetings. Instead of blurting out ideas, participants, who remain anonymous, type them into computers -- a process that both equalizes participation and keeps an ongoing record of what is discussed and decided.
