All laptops come with a number of different ports. USB for connecting your pendrivers or dongles or VGA ports to connect your laptop to an external display. So what are the different ports offered and what is their use?
Learn MoreThe USB (Universal Serial Bus) is the most commonly used ports. Pendrives, Dongles, External Hard Drives , Programmable boards, etc all are can be connected to your laptop through the USB port. USB 3.0 and 2.0 are the types of ports that are coming with laptops nowadays. 3.0 provides much faster read and write speeds provided the attached peripheral is 3.0. 2.0 devices can be used with 3.0 ports too. Both the ports look very similar except for the color of the pin inside the port which is blue for 3.0 and generally black for 2.0 ports. Some laptops also provide a USB Rapid Charge port which has higher current output than the other ports and this can be used to charge USB devices at a faster rate and even when the laptop is powered off. USB 3.1 and USB Type C are relatively new with Type C being available in very few laptops. Type C ports can act as an all-in-one port and the physical size of the port is very small.
The ethernet port is used to connect a LAN wire to your laptop therby enabling it to connect to a local network or the internet. The ethernet port is a RJ-45 (Registered Jack 45) port. Almost all laptops come with one ethernet port.
The VGA (Video Graphics Array) port is used to display the contents of your laptop on a TV or a projector. The maximum resolution of the output display is 640x480 and is not dependent on the resolution of your laptop. Also, audio cannot be sent through the VGA port. VGA port is not coming in the more recent laptops due to the existence of the HDMI port.
The HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) port can be used to connect your laptop to a TV or a projector just like the VGA port. The difference is that HDMI can output at 4K (3840 x 2160) and audio can be sent along with the video. The port size is smaller when compared to the VGA port and an even smaller mini-HDMI port is available. Most of the laptops come with one HDMI port.
Thunderbolt, developed under the name Light Peak specially designed for apple macbook and iMac. It is a hardware interface that allows the connection of external peripherals to a computer. It is a technology gives you access to a world of high-speed peripherals and high-resolution displays via one simple port and a cable that carries both DisplayPort and PCI Express data. It gives you two channels on the same connector with 10 Gbps of throughput in both directions. Ultra-fast, ultra-flexible Thunderbolt 2 pushes that to 20 Gbps. You can move data to and from peripherals up to 40 times faster than with USB 2 and up to 25 times faster.