A Port for Every Ship: Expanding Your Computers Functionality with a USB Adapter

Contributed by Jay Schroyer

If you’ve ever taken a look at the back of your computer, you’ve probably been greeted with the sight of tangled cables and oddly shaped, color coded ports for the addition of a multitude of peripherals. It wasn’t always that way. In their earlier stages, computers didn’t support many peripherals. You’d find a port for the monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer, and maybe an additional port for expansion. There were serial ports; ports used for simple, one-bit communication like a mouse, and wide parallel ports, 25-pin connections for higher bandwidth peripherals like printers and other computers to aid large quantities of data to be transferred.

As computer technology moved forward, more and more ports began to switch over to the USB or Universal Serial Bus format leaving many old printers and peripherals useless, as there was no available port to connect them to. With the new USB port, up to 127 peripherals can be connected to the computer using multi-ported hubs! That’s an amazing leap forward compared to the limiting ports of yesterday’s computers.

Inside a USB cable, you find four wires, two of which supply power to the connected device and two that allow for data transfer to and from the computer. This is why some USB peripherals (ones that don’t demand large amounts of power) can be attached to the computer to charge their batteries (if they’re portable) and they never have to be tied down by an AC adapter. The USB port also allows for very fast data transfer, (up to 480 mb per second with a 2.0 port) which greatly speeds up the processes of printing and data transfer.

You would be hard pressed to find a new computer for sale nowadays that didn’t have at least one USB port. The computer I’m using right now has a row of four in the back and then an additional two behind a faceplate on the front. They’ve become synonymous with quick and easy data transfer and peripheral connection and have helped to standardize peripheral connection to computers.

What’s more is that now when a device is connected to the computer, the computer recognizes it and automatically installs the driver. Earlier devices came with disks that contained the devices driver and the user would have to install the driver and restart before the device would even be recognized or usable by the computer.

I don’t even know if you can buy a new printer today that doesn’t connect to your cpu using a USB cable. But what do you do if you have a perfectly good printer (or other favorite peripheral like a mouse or joystick) sitting at home that uses an old parallel (or serial) connection? Can you use it on your new computer? You could go the hard route and purchase an expansion card that you could install into your computer. You would have to remove the computers shell, install the card and port, and then install the software to get it to work. And you would need to install a card for each device that you wanted to connect which could get pretty costly.

Or, you could just purchase a USB adapter, plug it into a USB port, then your peripheral, and you’d be ready to go. Ranging anywhere from $16 to $30 in price and available at just about any computer or office store, USB adapters allow you to connect your old serial or parallel peripherals through a USB port. It’s the computer world equivalent of an electrical outlet adapter that allows you to plug a grounded, three-pronged appliance into an outlet that doesn’t contain a ground hole. Installation is as easy as opening the package, plugging the USB end into an available USB port on your computer, and then connecting the other end to your peripheral. You don’t even have to restart your computer as USB devices will be automatically recognized when it is plugged into the computer. Should the computer not be able to find a driver for your installed device (if it’s a printer), you can always look online for the manufacturer’s website. Many of them offer free driver downloads.

As you can see, a USB adapter is a very practical, inexpensive, versatile, and simple way to expand the functionality of your cpu and you don’t need to be a computer professor to do it. If you want more information about USB devices and installation, there are plenty of resources that offer free computer assistance and training, but with the ease of installation that USB offers, you can now spend more time enjoying your peripherals than sweating over how to install them.

About the Author:
Jay Schroyer has worked in the client and customer service end of business for over five years in retail, advertising, and printing. He holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in English writing and communication.

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