"back in the day" we had a Windows ME laptop (that should tell you the day pretty accurately) - it worked great for about a year, battery was strong, until... we added a PCMCIA slot WiFi card, because: WiFi. Welp, super cool to be able to roam around the house wireless on that WiFi card, for about a week before it bricked the battery. Seems that the battery maintenance algorithms weren't tuned to play nice with the (rather significant) power draw of that 1st gen WiFi card. So, instead of just needing a network cable, then we just needed a power cable (and insulation to keep the thing from burning our lap).