Legacy ports - what's everyone using to replace them ?

USB everything my friend.

USB 2.0 for everything..... 480 mb/sec transfer..... Fast

USB, firewire & PCMCIA port. I use it all.

i use all usb and firewire nowadays ps2 and serial is old SHI# nowadays.

So many ways to say, "I don't know. I'm sorry that I can't be of any help. I do feel, however, that it's very important that I post a reply anyway."

I was wishing that I had a PS2 port the other day as well because I have an old game that doesn't support USB.


-Doc

The only thing I miss is the infrared port. My old laptop had it, and I used it with my printer. I now connect it via USB. Now I have to deal with the stupid cable.

I miss the serial port. Although usb -> serial adabters exist they generally suck and can not provide the consistancy for programming IC's and such. Had to do my senior design project on a 4 year old laptop at first since it was the only one with a good enough serial port.

Do you actually know what you are talking about at all or are you just throwing out some number you heard..

Name one device that would have used a legacy port that would use that sort of bandwidth?

You need a USB Bluetooth Dongle, my man. Plug that little Bluetooth transmitter into the USB port of your printer, and you will connect wirelessly to your XPS/9300.

You DID order the Bluetooth 350 option on your laptop, now, didn't you??

LMFAO! No way USB 2.0 will EVER hit 480! Only in your dreams...

IEEE 1394 (Firewire 400) is significantly faster than USB 2, even though Firewire is 400mbps & USB is 480mbps. USB is VERY CPU intensive whereas Firewire is "intelligent" and requires little CPU. IEEE 1394b is far, far faster @ 800mbps. That translates into 100MBps/1GB in 10 seconds! Firewire devices have the intelligence built in, you just daisy chain them from one to another. (that's why only one conn on pc) I use a Firewire 800 PC Card to connect to 3 Lacie Big Extreme 500GB ext HDD's and a DVD burner. I've asked many times why Dell doesn't add an 800 connection but they don't have a good answer. (course they only put 10/100 eithernet on 9300 but a 10/100/1000 on XPS-2)

btw, the "network" designation is because the daisy chain is like its own network. You can connect up to 63 devices I think.

I'm no fan of Apple at all but Firewire is far superior technology than USB. When they wrote the specs they already included 400/800/1600. God only knows what 1600 would be like. Worthless for HDD's, 800 is just as fast as any internal PC bus.

I can restore 10GB from a Retrospect backup in bout 5 mins. Those are selected files out of a system backup and from about 25 backup sets. Considering the processing going on I consider that very fast. USB could never touch it.

the only reason you see USB everywhere is that it's an open standard (free) whereas Firewire is proprietary (owned by Apple).

btw, USB stands for Unbelievably Shxxxy Bus lol (I think that's the official name)

I did some very extensive research several months ago before deciding which way to go. But I saw just way too many times where tests showed that Firewire 400 beat USB 480.

Again, USB is a "dumb" standard, it must use the CPU as a controller. Firewire has the intelligence built in.

Really good link: http://www.lacie.com/download/more/...ireWire_800.pdf

Designed to facilitate the transfer and networking of large amounts of varying types of digital data between systems and individual users, FireWire has become an indispensable part of the consumer electronics and personal computer industries. Apple’s contribution to FireWire has been recognized by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences with an Emmy award for the creation of the standard, which has numerous applications in the television industry.

And in the computer industry, Intel VP Anand Chandrasekher foresees digital video and FireWire becoming an even bigger part of PCs, and to “Expect to see a ton of 1394.”

FireWire Environments
When the original FireWire standard was introduced in 1995, it was a revolution in and of itself. It provided thirty times the bandwidth of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) 1.1 peripheral standard, and enabled a whole new host of features and applications. FireWire 800 offers users data-transfer speeds of 800Mbsp today, which is two times faster than the 400Mbps of original FireWire. All versions of FireWire offer Plug & Play connectivity, allowing users to simply plug in their drive and begin using it. They also allow up to 63 devices to be connected via a single bus and offer peer-to-peer connectivity, enabling multiple computers and FireWire devices to be connected at the same time. FireWire also supports both isochronous and asynchronous capabilities, meaning that it can guarantee real-time data delivery, so there is no danger of inaccurately ordered or delayed content.

This is a good USB v. Firewire+ comparison and it's very informative: http://www.usb-ware.com/firewire-vs-usb.htm

FireWire, uses a "Peer-to-Peer" architecture in which the peripherals are intelligent and can negotiate bus conflicts to determine which device can best control a data transfer

Hi-Speed USB 2.0 uses a "Master-Slave" architecture in which the computer handles all arbitration functions and dictates data flow to, from and between the attached peripherals (adding additional system overhead and resulting in slower data flow control)

Read Test:
5000 files (300 MB total) FireWire was 33% faster than USB 2.0
160 files (650MB total) FireWire was 70% faster than USB 2.0

Write Test:
5000 files (300 MB total) FireWire was 16% faster than USB 2.0
160 files (650MB total) FireWire was 48% faster than USB 2.0


So when you get up into GB's there's no comparison. THEN move up to Firewire 800 and it's an Indy car vs an SUV...

that's all great and all...

so back to his original question...

Wouldn't a USB bort use that much during data transfer with a storage device? I copied like 6 divx movies (~700 MB each) from my ipod to my friend's computer and it only took a few minutes...it seemed to be going extremely fast. Also, wouldn't a digital video camera use that kind of bandwidth when copying/streaming video to the comp? I'm no expert on this so correct me if I'm wrong.

Oh, and about your question, I find it aggravating as well that those ports are gone; they tended to provide the best conversion anyways (for me at least).... I play Stepmania sometimes and the best Playstation Controller -> PC cable I could find that actually worked right was a parallel port one. I also like to play the old Star Wars flight sim games (was actually playing TIE Fighter till 3:30 AM last night...I just dug it out recently) and the lack of game ports on new computers is annoying (luckily my family comp was bought just before they stopped including game ports). I'd like to play it on my current laptop (see sig; I'm still waiting for my 9300...), but alas, there's no game port (they don't really come standard in laptops of any time, apparently.) But the problem with converters is that there is almost always some kind of reliability or quality loss between the USB and parallel/serial/game port interface when you use a converter plug. I'd just upgrade your stuff; if you're using a PS2 mouse it can't be all that good anyways...

The current crop of portable hard drives and media players were partly made possible by USB. They did not exist in their current form while legacy ports were in existance. Well they did exist, they were just not mainstream consumer products.

So back to my question, name one application whereby a device that was traditionally used in conjunction with legacy ports now use anywhere near the maximum transfer rates offered by USB2..

As far as I know, there is no simple dongle to plug into your printer's usb so it transmits via bluetooth. Since the printer USB is on the "recieving" end, it can't power a dongle. You'll either have to buy a printer with bluetooth built in, or buy a rather bulky bluetooth attachment that uses AC power. Standard dongles won't work