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CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

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bus was 32 bits wide and ran at 33 MHz, which was superb, but these

features were expected and not earth-shattering. The coolness of PCI came

from its capability to coexist with other expansion buses. When PCI first

came out, you could buy a motherboard with both PCI and older slots. This

was important because users could keep their old expansion cards and slowly

migrate to PCI. Equally impressive was that PCI devices were (and still are)

self-configuring, a feature that led to the industry standard that became

known as plug and play (PnP). Finally, PCI had a powerful burst-mode

feature that enabled very efficient data transfers.

Mini-PCI

PCI made it into laptops in the specialty Mini-PCI format (see Figure 6-23).

Mini-PCI was designed to use low power and to lie flat—both good features

for a laptop expansion slot. Mini-PCI, like full-sized PCI, is only on older

computers.

Figure 6-23 Tiny card in Mini-PCI slot. See the contacts at the bottom of the

picture?

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