After 12 yrs, finally got hs, but ethernet card is fried

After 12 yrs high speed finally is in my area. Called got it, but than i remembered that lighting hit my telephone line which was plugged into my ethernet port when I was using dial up. I bought a card and opened up my pc and than realized that the port is made on to the motherboard.

The only card that I can remove is the "line in" card. It is really small so I am guessing it is a PCI-E card. This is the "line in" card I removed. So do I need a PCI-E ethernet card, and can I replace the "line in" card with an ethernet card?

My pc is an Acer Aspire X3300. I enclosed the pic of the line in card.

If you were previously on dial-up then I do not believe you were using the ethernet port. You used the smaller port on the modem.

The two ports do look similar with the ethernet port being the larger of the two

according to these specs: http://support.acer.com/acerpanam/desktop/2010/acer/aspire/AspireX3300/AspireX3300sp2.shtml

Networking: LAN: Gigabit Ethernet WLAN3: IEEE 802.11b/g Modem3: 56K

You have both an onboard modem and a lan port. As ThunderZ states the lan port is the 'oversized' port. See the attached imaged for comparison purposes.

Ok the right port above, the larger one is the one that is no longer working. What can I do? Thanks.

Thanks for the specs and pics Animal.

@ ErikEverhard. The specs state as you suspected that all you have are 2 PCIe slots. Yes you will need a PCIe NIC to use one.

The bright side of this is PCIe NIC`s are rated at 1GB transfer rates. You may or may not notice a slight difference in your connection speed. If you are ever hooked up to a LAN = Local Area Network with other 1GB capable machines then you will notice a difference in things like file transfer speed.

Just curious as to what card you did remove? Line in? I can`t tell from the pic.

Edited by ThunderZ, 14 February 2011 - 08:51 PM.

Yeah the card that you see is the "Line in". Can I just replace that card with a pci-e ethernet card? Here is the back of my pc. As you can see the telephone line did fit into the ethernet port. Up top, the green port is the "Line in". Thanks for any info. After 12 yrs of dial up I cannot take anymore.

Yeah the card that you see is the "Line in". Can I just replace that card with a pci-e ethernet card?

Yes. Should work fine.

Here is the back of my pc. As you can see the telephone line did fit into the ethernet port. Up top, the green port is the "Line in". Thanks for any info. After 12 yrs of dial up I cannot take anymore.

The phone line my physically fit in the ethernet port. But I assure you it will not do anything\work. A smaller round peg will fit in a larger square hole. But it can`t do anything once in there and has no business being there.

Thanks everyone for all the help.