Connect a laptop at home

Many folks have laptops...either personal or work-issued...that they would like to network into their home LANs.

There are a number of advantages to connecting a laptop to a home LAN, including:

• working on and sharing large files...those too big to swap with floppies
• sharing home network resources such as printers (yes you can simply plug the laptop into the computer, but then everyone else on the network loses printing capability)
• connecting into shared, fast internet access at home (although this creates some specific difficulties...more on that later).
• and many others.

The question is how to best do this so as to take advantage of your existing home network AND at the same time not make any configuration changes that will create difficulties in using the laptop back at work or elsewhere.

In this homePCnetwork "how to" we are going to present two ways to accomplish this.

• In Part I, we cover a simple method that provides for connectivity to a basic peer-to-peer network, but will not connect to an NT server configuration nor share internet access; and
• In Part II, we detail a slightly more complicated method that provides the most complete way to separate your home setup from work/office setup AND provides any/all network functionality you might need, including internet sharing.
• NOTE (December 2003 update): You'll also want to check our reviews on network switching utilities in our software section for another option to connect a laptop to a home network.

In both instances, we're going to suggest the use of standard 10 or 100Mbps Ethernet networking. There are several products, including wireless products, that can work with laptops, but we think standard Ethernet LANs are the way go, especially for these laptop configurations.

For laptops, network cards come in a configuration originally called PCMCIA, but now known popularly as PC Cards. These are credit-card size adapters that fit into a special slot usually on the side of your laptop. The slots look like this...this shows how you plug an adapter cable into a PC Card already in the slot:

For this "how to", we're going to use a great little card supplied by the folks over at LanMarket - the SMC EZ CardBus 10/100. This card has ALL of the features you would want in a laptop Ethernet adapter.

So click here to go to the introduction of Part 1 or Part II.

[ Up ] [ Laptop Part 1 ] [ Laptop Part 2 ]

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This page last updated 12/21/2003