VisorCentral.com - Legacy Ports on PC Notebooks

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Posted by Vinny on 12-09-2001 04:36 AM:

Legacy Ports on PC Notebooks

I was pondering this today. Why do nearly all PC notebooks have old archaic legacy ports like parallel ports, serial ports, and ps2 ports? USB has replaced these for more than a year (you could even argue two). Couldn't they save money, cut costs, and improve design by cutting these from the mix leaving 2 USB, IEEE1394, S-video, audio, ethernet, modem and external monitor ports?

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Posted by Keefer Lucas on 12-09-2001 02:16 PM:

Re: Legacy Ports on PC Notebooks

quote:
Originally posted by Vinny
Couldn't they save money, cut costs, and improve design by cutting these...

Not when the Asian manufacturers still have hundreds of thousands of motherboards (such as they are on Notebooks) in stock that they are unloading on the cheap. Once the backlog has cleared over the next year I suspect we will see the last of laptops with legacy ports.

Posted by sowens on 12-09-2001 02:56 PM:

Actually they are, and it's causing some problems.

Where I work, we use the serial port to upgrade our products in the field. We're in the process of replacing a number of notebooks, and, from my understanding, all the new notebooks from Compaq don't have the standard 9 pin serial ports anymore. They only have USB ports.

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Posted by MarkEagle on 12-09-2001 02:56 PM:

Re: Re: Legacy Ports on PC Notebooks

quote:
Originally posted by Keefer Lucas
Once the backlog has cleared over the next year I suspect we will see the last of laptops with legacy ports.

Perhaps, but as long as there are legacy peripherals out there...

I suppose someday, those ports will disappear altogether, even from desktops. I've seen those USB docking stations that provide the legacy ports...

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Posted by Keefer Lucas on 12-09-2001 05:33 PM:

Re: Re: Re: Legacy Ports on PC Notebooks

quote:
Originally posted by MarkEagle
Perhaps, but as long as there are legacy peripherals out there...

I get a kick out of the notion of legacy peripherals. At work they once spent several hundred dollars extra on a workstation to support a scanner that required a SCSI card interface (this was actually foisted as the primary justification for the specific machine). Meanwhile, I ran to Staples and bought a $35 refurbed HP Scanjet with a USB connector and hooked it to my machine. Viola! It even had better specs than the old scanner.

I suspect that every year companies waste millions, if not billions of dollars supporting legacy peripherals in an attempt to look "thrifty" to COOs who don't know squat about IT issues. There are certainly some devices out there that businesses have alot invested in (bar code scanners and custom input devices and the like), but for the most part I've never come in contact with a legacy device that couldn't be canned for a relatively inexpensive new device with a USB connector.

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