Most Useful PCMCIA Card

My M570RU is coming in on Wednesday, if not on Tuesday. I'll have one beautiful ExpressCard 54 on it, and I won't have anything to cram into it. So I came here to ask of all of you, what do you think the most useful ExpressCard is? X-Fi audio? eSATA? ASUS XG station?

Please also say which you chose and why.



EDIT: Docking stations, memory, memory card adapters, PCI expansions, SATA, and USB all fall under "External Connection Upgrade."

Wireless Lan and Broadband Internet fall under "Internet Upgrade."

Everything else falls under "Other."

 

I would personally use it for Broadband internet(mobility-there isnt wifi everywere) or esata(space) or memory/hard drive(SSD-speed)

BTW here are other uses for express cards

 

Your post is misleading, PCMCIA is last generation, Expresscard is a different type. Personally I like my Esata card.

 

My apologies; I had the impression that they were one and the same.

 

Nope PCMCIA is a few years old now, Its larger and draws more power, Has substantially less bandwidth.

 

1991 according to Wikipedia. Nice list of uses for it, Kdawgca.

I'd suggest just leaving it empty until you want to add something that can use an express card slot. If you want X-Fi audio, go for it, you can always switch the cards later if you want. But if you get your laptop and everything works great and you don't want the express card for that, there's no harm in leaving it empty until something else catches your attention.

The Internet Upgrade option doesn't seem to make much sense to me. You already are getting Wireless N, which should be backwards compatible with other wireless, and unless your notebook won't have modem/ethernet ports I don't see why you'd need this on the ExpressCard.

 

For Express Card, I think eSATA is very nice feature.

 

eSATA and a sound card.

 

What's the most useful card really depends on the spec of the notebook. For example, some old PCs may not have a LAN network card, and so, it would be hugely beneficial to install a LAN PCMCIA card. But for newer laptops, this would be a rather stupid upgrade.

I wouldn't recommend an external GPU. The data transfer speed would be far too low.

The M570RU is well equipped, and there is not much point buying hardware that's already fitted, and that is good quality. eSATA would be a good choice for an external HDD.