Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9271 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Nisis
• Model: 16101

Box Contents

Customer Reviews

Inexpensive, easy to install accessory for PC use with iPod
I only bought this card after buying a new iPod and then realising that I needed to purchase either a Firewire card or an iPod USB Dock connector in order to get iPod to work on my PC (iPod is understandably optimised for Mac's!).

After looking at both options, I decided to go for the firewire card option for three reasons;

1. It allows the iPod to charge from your PC whilst it is in the docking station (thus saving you the need for another plug point for the iPod charger and allowing me to minimise the cable spaghetti under my desk)
2. To take advantage of the faster transfer speeds (so I am told) of the firewire connection over USB.
3. Once installed I have an accessory with multiple uses (for instance I can use the connection for my zip disk back-ups too) rather than it being a single purpose accessory as the USB Dock Connector is.

I approached the install with some trepidation as I had never installed a PC card before, however after reading the (somewhat brief) instructions, I was able to install this card into my Dell PC in about 5 minutes. All I needed was a single screwdriver to remove one of the port blanking plates on my PC and the card slotted straight in. Windows XP already has pre-loaded drivers to support this card, so after turning my PC on the files updates automatically, I was then prompted to restart my PC and everything works fine.

No aggravation, easy to install and no PC savvy needed. An all round great product, which incidentally costs pretty much the same as the iPod USB Dock Connector.

Works a treat with my iPod
I bought the NISIS FireWire card in order to sync my new Apple iPod with my PC. The NISIS card took just a few seconds to install without having to install any drivers or anything. WindowsXP detected and recognised the new hardware straight away. The iPod works fine with it too and as well as sync'ing my songs, the iPod recharges through the FireWire connection too.

Firewire as the alternative Network
Installation:
Very easy, just one screw!
Auto-detected and installed by Windows ME fine with no CD needed. (though Windows 98SE would require its CD)

Below is what I wanted and have experienced with this NISIS card:

To connect my DV camcorder (for recording video to my harddisk)
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Total success, no problems using both the supplied cable & ULEAD Video Studio 5 - which offers direct DV capture & superb compression to DVD MPEG2 in very easy steps. Even the adding of animated and 3D titles was simple to learn in a few minutes. No apparent loss of quality either in compressing a 605 Meg DV AVI clip to 125 Meg!

Network between Windows ME PC and a Windows XP Notebook.
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Works fine. After following the Windows ME Help on 'Setting up a home network' was easy and produced a floppy disk to set up the network on the other PC (my notebook) - but since this had XP the floppy program refused to run. By following the Windows XP Help to produce the floppy disk instead, everything went fine and I now have a working shared folder with fast transfers via the NISIS firewire card.

Sharing an Internet Connection
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Not so easy, I've tried various things but I suspect I'll need to read more of the windows help and the web to set this up properly. But since this NISIS card works fine for networking I see this as a windows issue and should work with enough fiddling.

All in all, a fine card, easy setup and with the free cable is near perfect, giving fast transfers for a cheaper price than most!