Thinkpads Forum

Is there such an animal? This antique runs Windows 95, and I thought my grandson could use it to send and receive emails, but it has no ethernet port (or USB port, or CD ROM drive). If it would accommodate a LAN network card, could somebody please advise what to look for? Or where? And where to find installation instructions.

Thanks.

Hi and welcome to the forum!

You can use a Type II or Type III PCMCIA ethernet adapter, but as I know not many of these adapters support anything lower than Windows 98, at least the adapter in my IBM 240 doesn't support operating systems older than Windows 2000. Also, do make sure that the one you buy meets your system's specs.

You might need another PCMCIA adapter probably USB or CD-ROM/Floppy drive to install driver for ethernet, because Win 95 doesn't play very nice with drivers.

You can buy such an adapter from eBay or any other equivalent online/retail store, installation instruction usually accompanies with the card, nonetheless you can also consult following manual:- http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... TJKLN.html

Hope it helps.

There are PCMCIA adapters that have DOS/Windows 3.11 drivers too.

For example a Hawking Technologies 10/100 PCMCIA card has drivers for the following:

DOS/WFW/OS2/NT3.51/NT4/2000/95/98/Netware/Linus

Hey thanks Unknown_K for the information.

PCMCIA network cards (16 bit) generally supported very old OS systems, it was when cardbus (32bit) took over that old OS systems started getting dropped. You might be stuck with 10Mbs speed on a 10/100 card in DOS/WFW but they will work reliably.

Good information, although I don't have a system running anything older than XP but I will keep this in mind for future use, I hope the OP also finds this helpful.

Thanks Unknown_k!