Enhance your laptop with expansion cards

We’ve listed some of the best expansion card products in the box below. Before rushing out to buy, though, it’s important to know that there are several different types of notebook expansion slot, and to work out which is used by your computer. Fortunately this is usually easy to do.

Pick the right card
There are four different types of expansion cards available for notebooks, although some are only found on older models. The oldest type is called PCMCIA. These cards were originally developed to make adding memory to a notebook simple but soon evolved so notebook users could add modems (this was a long time before broadband) or network adapters. A PCMCIA card is 54mm wide, 85mm long and either 5mm or 10mm thick. Although popular in the 1990s, you are very unlikely to have a notebook with an original PCMCIA card slot today.

PCMCIA was followed by an upgraded version called Cardbus. These cards are exactly the same shape as the older PCMCIA cards but can usually be distinguished by a thin gold strip with several lumps on it running across the end of the card that’s inserted into the notebook. A few business notebooks on sale today still include Cardbus slots so that businesses can continue to work with older equipment, and if you have a notebook that’s more than a year or two old it may well have one or two Cardbus slots.

In the last few years, though, Cardbus has been slowly replaced by a completely new system called Express Card. Express Cards come in two varieties ­ Express Card 34 and Express Card 54 ­ with the numbers referring to the width of the cards in millimetres. Both types of card are the same length, and the section at the end that plugs into a notebook is also the same size and shape. This makes Express Card 34 cards long and thin, while Express Card 54 cards are wider at one end and L-shaped.

Just as Express Cards themselves come in two main types, so do the Express Card slots in notebook computers. Obviously the narrower Express Card 34 slots can only be used with the narrow Express Card 34 cards, but you can put either type of card into a wider Express Card 54 slot ­ the thinner Express Card 34 products slot neatly in with room to spare.

One thing to remember when thinking about the size and dimensions of expansion cards is that the measurements given here are for the part of the card that fits inside the notebook only. Although some cards, such as memory card readers, can usually fit entirely inside a notebook computer’s expansion slot, others cannot. Mobile broadband adapters, for example, usually need an aerial, while sound cards need to have plenty of sockets for headphones, speakers and microphones. This means that many expansion cards have a part that protrudes from the PC. This can sometimes get in the way but usually the protruding part of a card is far less annoying ­ and far harder to dislodge ­ than a USB product.