Upgrading & Fixing Laptops DUMmIES

The arrival of high-speed USB allows laptops to have direct communication

with devices including digital cameras, external hard drives, and CD and DVD

drives (which are very demanding of bandwidth).

The first iteration of the standard, USB 1.0, is not quite as zippy — only

12 Mbps — but is sufficient for some uses. A USB 1.0 device (or one that

follows the slightly improved 1.1 specification) will work in a USB 2.0 port,

although it stays at its original speed.

Usbing a USB port ..............................................................................

Most laptops offer two USB ports, and devices can be directly plugged in to

either. (It doesn’t matter which one you use; the computer sorts out all of the

details for you.) If you need to attach more USB devices than your laptop has

Chapter 16: Breaking Out of the Box: PC Cards, USB, and FireWire 245

Down to the FireWire

The fastest wired communication standards on
consumer-grade laptops are FireWire and USB
2.0, which are capable of transmitting data as

much as 3,500 to 4,000 times faster than an orig-

inal standard serial port. The accompanying

table shows the comparison.

FireWire versus USB 2.0

Port Typical Speed
Speed Index

Standard serial port 115 Kbps 1

Standard parallel port 115 KBps 8

USB 1.1 12 Mbps 104

ECP/EPP parallel port 16–24 Mbps 133–200

IEEE 1394/FireWire 400 Mbps 3,478

USB 2.0 480 Mbps 4,174