Laptop owners will probably be familiar with USB ports and how a variety of devices can be attached, but there are lots of other input and output connectors which you can use to interface many other devices to a laptop and enlarge its capabilities.

An extremely large number of USB products are available and can be interfaced with a typical laptop computer as almost all have USB ports. Care should be taken though as up until recently only USB 1 & 2 were available and were pretty much interchangeable, on the other hand, USB 3 is now being supplied on the latest laptops and is not compatible with the earlier designs. You are able to identify a USB 1 and 2 as it has a oblong metal connector together with 4 connection pins; the latest USB 3 incorporates a similar connector but with 9 connection pins. The USB 3 connection offers much quicker connection than USB 1 or USB 2 connections but only allows gadgets created for this kind of connector. If you try to force a USB 2 connector into a USB 3 socket harm will occur.

Several of the most up to date laptop computers have a HDMI connector to connect the laptop to a modern day TV. Nearly all older laptops have a VGA video output connector to output the video signal to most regular TVs. The HDMI can be identified as having an oblong connector with a pair of rows of pins, one of 9 pins, one of 10 pins making a total of 19 connections. The VGA connector can be identified as being rectangle with rounded ends and having three rows of 5 pin holes. The advantage of the HDMI connector is that more connections are utilized to interface the laptop to a Television or monitor resulting in superior picture quality.

Various types of sound connectors and arrangements have been used in laptops through the years. The simplest connection is by a phono plug supplying mono sound or a dual phono plug providing stereo sound. More recently a single stereo jack has been used along with a microphone input and line input. Audio input and output can easily be identified as the jack and phono sockets will almost always be viewed as small spherical holes or connectors.

Most laptop computers have a network connector commonly known as as a RJ45 connector. This can be identified as a square connector with 8 metal pins; there is a catch that holds the cable within the connector. This is usually utilized to connect the laptop directly to a network or to a router box to allow connection to the internet. You will find there's slightly smaller version of the connector with just 4 pins that is occasionally found on older laptop computers to link them to the internet via a phone line.

When inserting an cable great care must be taken to make sure that the plug is not inverted as damage to a laptop computer connector is expensive to correct and may make the laptop completely useless.

Graham Kelly has been repairing laptops, notebooks and pc at component level for many years. He is always happy to give technical guidance and can be contacted at Trilogic's internet site for laptop repairs.

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