Chapter 16
Chapter 16: Breaking Out of the Box: PC Cards, USB, and FireWire ........................
USB, and FireWire
In This Chapter
Playing 52 pickup with PC Cards
Sailing away with USB ports
Heating up with FireWire
T
he beauty of a laptop, of course, lies in its compactness and portability.
Here’s a case where small is definitely better than large. But as I’ve
already discussed, petite avoirdupois generally comes at the price of limited
access to the internals. (In other words, it’s difficult to gain access to the
inside of a little box.)Unlike desktop and tower PCs, laptops do not include extra internal bays to
hold additional hard drives, CD or DVD drives, or other devices. And although
laptop motherboards are similar to those used in desktop machines, they do
not offer rows of slots designed to accommodate plug-in adapters or cards to
add new features.Both laptops and desktops share the ability to communicate with external
devices that plug in to small ports. The most common of these connections
are called serialand parallel ports, and they are useful for the relatively easy
demands of devices such as modems, printers, and pointing devices.This was the bad news for the first few generations of laptops: what you
bought from the manufacturer is what you would have for the life of the
machine, with just a few areas for expansion, such as adding more memory.
The next step in the evolution of laptops put some storage devices such as
hard drives and CD or DVD drives into pockets in the casing of the computer,
allowing them to be removed for upgrading. (Almost all of these bays used a
proprietary design for the drive hardware, meaning that an assembly for an
IBM ThinkPad could not be used on a Dell Inspiron. And this near monopoly
also limited the availability of devices and boosted their prices.)