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- — 12 May, 2000 13:49
All of the products require you to remove the cover on your PC, install a PCI adapter card, and connect a cord from the card to a phone jack. Then you must install driver software for the adapter card and set up file, printer, and Internet sharing. In all cases, the PC with the modem and phone-line connection becomes a server for Internet sharing, while the other networked PCs become clients. The server PC must be turned on and logged on to the Internet if you want to enable everyone in the family to surf and print as they please. Functioning as the Internet connection point for multiple PCs consumes some of a system's CPU cycles, but we didn't notice any appreciable slowdown on the server.
Any product here will share a modem or broadband connection among multiple connected computers. To set up sharing, you can use Windows 98 Second Edition's Internet Connection Sharing, but you must add it in the Add/Remove Programs control panel (Windows 98 SE doesn't install it by default). Several of the products include third-party applications to make setting up sharing even easier.
Though we got our network running within a couple of hours in each case, the kits varied widely in ease of setup. Intel's AnyPoint phone-line network and Dell's 4800LT wireless LAN were simplest to install, followed closely by 3Com's HomeConnect and Diamond Multimedia's HomeFree. Netgear's Phoneline10X has an automated setup that obscures some installation details, which might confuse network newbies. If you want to see everything that's going on, you may be disappointed by the product's lack of detailed documentation. Linksys HomeLink's manual installation is almost as challenging as that of Netgear's wired ethernet network kit.
To add the Dell laptop to our wireless network, we installed a driver and inserted the PC Card, which carries a built-in antenna. None of the phone-line companies offer PC Card adapters for laptops, but Xircom says that, by the time you read this, its RealPort PC card will allow connections to phone-line networks.
