Kensington Portable Universal Docking Station

Are you kidding me??? With all the wireless and bluetooth devices out there, this seems kinda lame. A useless product unless you are still living in the year 2000. : ) Sorry woot - you need to speak to the guy who found this deal and talked you all into actaully selling it. Make sure he is up with the times so to speak.

Anyone know if it works with Macs too? Just curious…

yes, if you get the converters for the outlets…it has its own power supply.

yeah, what he said, he saved me the trouble. Crap w00t!

Should not be an issue since it probably does not require you to plug into a 220V outlet. The laptop AC adapter should be (again…SHOULD BE) auto sensing and accepts 110V or 220V…just make sure you bring your 110V -> 220V adapter. You should also know that 220V outlets are not all the same all over Europe. CHECK it out!

It says one ether net but on the side it looks like theres two slots for something, what are those?? Can it be used to access office printer through VPN ??
Can it listen to NASCAR laptops talking to pit laptops?

This looks like some folks will really get some use out of it, while others will sort of yawn and ask themselves, “Why would I really need that, anyway?” Like all Woots. The good news is that this one is unlikely to start a culture war, like the last one…

USB input and power input.

Someone asked “Who would want/need to hook all of that “crap” up to a laptop anyway?”

I can only see this thing working wonders for me at college…you know hauling my laptop back and forth from my place, to class, to the library, and back home where I would have to once again re-plug in the printer, web cam, mouse, photo printer speakers, internet cable…

wonders i tell you…wonders…this looks like a MUST!

Kensington’s driver download page doesn’t have any drivers. Guess I’ll stick with USB peripherals and a simple USB hub as the “docking station” for my Powerbook.

I’m sure glad they expressed that USB 2.0 is still backwards-compatible. I was about to get worried if it had changed on us. You know… Taken us by suprize. And yes, it would have scared me if it was USB 1.1 running at 2.0 speeds.

Now why not just use a cheap USB hub?

Actually, there are quite a few serial devices still being made today. Any piece of electronics that can be reprogramed (cell phones, PDA’s, Radios, etc) typically does not use USB, but uses RS232… There are plenty of people out there that have stuff to use RS232 with… For how often I use it, I’ll buy it at Radio Shack and then return it afterwards (I’ve done this)…

Reviews on Amazon and epinions are not very good. Check them before you buy this, even though the price is pretty good.

No. All they’re saying is that it’s compatible with USB 1.1 devices. If your laptop is old enough to have only USB 1.1 ports, you get only USB 1.1 speed through your printer, network connection, etc. It won’t magically upgrade you to USB 2.0.

Because a lot of newer laptops don’t have serial, parallel and PS/2 ports

These are great devices that really make working with a laptop easier. I have a similiar one by Mobility so I don’t need this one, but it is really convinient to just plug in one cord and have all your devices connected.

Wrong.

It’s the newer laptops that will need it, since several of the newer ones do not have a serial port.

Because some people are still living in the Dark Ages. Parallel? Serial? PS/2?!?! All are dying technologies. USB FTW!

Why? 10mb/s or 100mb/s especially? USB2.0 has a data transfer rate of 480mb/s. those are well within that range. and unless you’re doing inter-network file transfers between computers with gigabit NICs (and have a gigabit switch or other such network hub which most people don’t). You’ll never get even close to 1000 mb/s on the internet. the average cable modem feeds data somewhere between 2-8mb/s usually.

Edit: I also doubt that the Ethernet port on this even supports gigabit, it’s most likely 10/100 anyway.