ExpressCards--The PC Card's Long Awaited Replacement

Last summer, when I was getting ready to go to school, I bought a laptop. I was all ready to stick my old WIFI PC card into it, when I discovered that what I thought was the PC card slot was, in fact, labeled "ExpressCard." I didn't have any idea what "ExpressCard" meant, but I decided to go for it anyway. The card made it about halfway in and stopped. What the hell? A laptop without a PC card slot? That was silly.

After doing some research, I found out that the ExpressCard is the new replacement to the PC card. The PC card, it turns out, has been around for 16 years, making it one of the longest running pieces of computer related gadgetry ever to exist. However, despite its good run, the time has come for a replacement.

The ExpressCard was initially introduced in 2003, and slots for it began appearing in laptops the year after. It is only slightly smaller than the PC card, being 75 mm rather than 86 mm in length, and comes in two widths. The smaller version of the card, dubbed ExpressCard/34 for its 34 mm width, was designed first, with the assumption that smaller would prove to be better. However, manufacturers quickly realized that bulkier pieces of technology, like CompactFlash card readers and mini hard drives, wouldn't fit, and thus the ExpressCard/54 was designed. Now, most new computers are equipped with the larger slot, and are able to accept both sizes of card.

The chief improvement the ExpressCard shows over the PC card is its mechanism of interfacing with computer. PC cards required their own unique I/O system, which had to be directly connected to the motherboard. Thus, the PC card proved to be rather expensive, although it managed the reasonable data transfer rate of 132 MBPS. ExpressCards, however, require no such link, and can connect to the computer via either the USB 2.0 card or PCI Expressbus, a newer, cheaper data transfer system installed on most new computers. It can achieve speeds of 480 MBPS with the USB interface, and can reach as high as 2.5 GBPS when hooked up to the Expressbus.

Although originally designed to serve the roles previously served by PC cards, as a means of adding modems, WIFI, memory, and other things to laptops, ExpressCards, with their added speed, will be able to do more. With the ability to transfer 2.5 GB in a second, ExpressCards will be useful as a platform to add things like Firewire and high speed Ethernet capabilities to laptops. Even relatively new technologies, like computer TV tuners are showing up on ExpressCards.

All this sounds great, but the chief nuisance of ExpressCards is their lack of compatibility with PC cards. Although there are a few laptops that are equipped with both PC card and ExpressCard slots, the majority of new laptops on the market (my own included) use only this new technology. I, for one, was greatly bummed out when I discovered that my several hundred dollars worth of PC cards were no longer going to be of any use to me.