Unfortunately, my wife's desktop machine is the PC equivalent of Chernobyl. It has suffered so many meltdowns and is such a jerry-rigged contraption of spare parts that I will have to wait a few years before I can open the hull without a radiation suit. So I started this project by linking my main CPU with the laptop we usually have upstairs. This didn't stop my wife's legal research, of course. But since she is consulting case law via a 28.8 modem, through AOL, and in a rig that was sure to crash every fifteen minutes or so, I figured I had some breathing room.

For the laptop, I needed an external phoneline network adapter, which 3Com doesn't offer. Theoretically, all HomePNA 2 products should be interoperable, so I tried both the NetGear USB phoneline network adapter and a similar unit from Intel. The NetGear has a lot going for it over the Intel. It is compact and self-powered. About the size of a cigarette pack, it draws all its juice from the USB port, while the Intel unit is oversized (trying to make a trendy fashion statement) and requires a separate power source. The NetGear connected to my laptop without muss or fuss. The software is much leaner and aloof than 3Com's and Intel's, with little beyond the network and shared Web access drivers and a pathetically thin user manual.

It ends up that while HomePNA 2 hardware from different vendors is technically interoperable (so you can mix and match elements) none of them is especially friendly to one another. The NetGear adaptor, working under its own networking software could not see my desktop network using the 3Com software. Since the 3Com software had already installed so nicely and it was much more user-friendly, I decided to use it on the laptop, too, and try to get it to handle the networking and shared access functions. In 3Com's case, the software did recognize my NetGear USB adaptor as valid, and it mapped the disks and printers among the two machines very well. I was sharing files between laptop and downstairs desktop at very speedy clips. I found I could transfer a 3MB file in under 30 seconds, and a 14.5 MB file in about two minutes, which is exponentially better than the crawling first generation phoneline networks I reviewed over a year ago.

My victory in establishing this basic file-sharing network was short-lived, however. My wife was starting to hit pay dirt, finding case law that was a little too close for comfort. “A woman in Boise was acquitted of assault and battery charges when she pummeled her husband with the TV remote control, which he had not relinquished in five years. The jury of twelve women not only pronounced her “not guilty” an hour into deliberations but were seen taking careful notes when the defendant recounted her technique for pummeling a husband with a universal remote without leaving telltale marks.