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irda,, fir, pcmcia
- Thread starter XoFF
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Hello,
PCMCIA (an advanced version is called CardBus) is an older way of providing expansion capabilities to laptops. Mostly these days it has been superseded by USB and USB2 interfaces, becase they are smaller and cheaper to add, and the peripherals that were normally pcmcia interfaced such as modems, LAN adapters etc, are now often motherboard integrated.
IRDA is the Infra Red Data Association and is a specification for an infra red port. Mostly this will appear as a com (serial) port to the operating system and is used for connecting low speed devices such as mobile phones although there are some printers with irda interfaces. Still useful though if you have a fancy mobile phone and need to synchronise contacts with that or a PDA.
Newer versions of IRDA can support 4Mbps connections but these require support on both sides of the connection.
If by "fir" you mean "firewire", this is Apple's name for the IEEE1394 specification, providing a 400Mbps connection. Nowadays it is normally used to interface to digital video devices such as camcorders although it can be used for networking with windows 98 and later.
Sony calls the same specification i.Link although Firewire is now more common.
John
PCMCIA (an advanced version is called CardBus) is an older way of providing expansion capabilities to laptops. Mostly these days it has been superseded by USB and USB2 interfaces, becase they are smaller and cheaper to add, and the peripherals that were normally pcmcia interfaced such as modems, LAN adapters etc, are now often motherboard integrated.
IRDA is the Infra Red Data Association and is a specification for an infra red port. Mostly this will appear as a com (serial) port to the operating system and is used for connecting low speed devices such as mobile phones although there are some printers with irda interfaces. Still useful though if you have a fancy mobile phone and need to synchronise contacts with that or a PDA.
Newer versions of IRDA can support 4Mbps connections but these require support on both sides of the connection.
If by "fir" you mean "firewire", this is Apple's name for the IEEE1394 specification, providing a 400Mbps connection. Nowadays it is normally used to interface to digital video devices such as camcorders although it can be used for networking with windows 98 and later.
Sony calls the same specification i.Link although Firewire is now more common.
John
mortis2000
Technical User
Actually, "fir" stands for 'fast' 'infra' 'red' and is just another way of the manufacturers confusing the general public with acronyms for the same things.
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