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From: Jeff on 3 Jun 2010 16:18
My brother has purchansed a Dell Laptop Inspiron. It doesn't come with
a docking station and he would like one. Dell quoted a Targus docking
station that plugs into the USB port. The docking station then
supports 4 usb ports (for like the keyboard, mouse, Printer, ect) and
also two video ports. One VGA and one DVI. All this is supposed to
work just fine with only One usb port plugged into the laptop. It
seems like there is gonna be a slow down in response expecially if he
does something with demanding graphics. The laptop has a seperate
Graphics card and I figure that he will be loosing at least some
resolution by runing it through the usb port instead of the graphics
port. Dell has said their would be no problem. Does that make sense?
Running a keyboard, mouse, printer, and video through just one usb
port on the laptop? Does anybody have experience with this type of
docking station and how well it really works?
From: BillW50 on 3 Jun 2010 19:04
On 6/3/2010 3:18 PM, Jeff wrote:
> My brother has purchansed a Dell Laptop Inspiron. It doesn't come with
> a docking station and he would like one. Dell quoted a Targus docking
> station that plugs into the USB port. The docking station then
> supports 4 usb ports (for like the keyboard, mouse, Printer, ect) and
> also two video ports. One VGA and one DVI. All this is supposed to
> work just fine with only One usb port plugged into the laptop. It
> seems like there is gonna be a slow down in response expecially if he
> does something with demanding graphics. The laptop has a seperate
> Graphics card and I figure that he will be loosing at least some
> resolution by runing it through the usb port instead of the graphics
> port. Dell has said their would be no problem. Does that make sense?
> Running a keyboard, mouse, printer, and video through just one usb
> port on the laptop? Does anybody have experience with this type of
> docking station and how well it really works?

I don't buy it for a second! One USB port is only good for 480Mbits/sec.
You can attach all you want too. But the total can never be over than
480Mbits/sec. And one USB2 can't even keep up with the video at all. Let
alone anything else he wants to run off of the other 4 USB ports. This
one port is USB2, right?

--
Bill
Thunderbird Portable 3.0 (20091130)
From: Jeff on 4 Jun 2010 08:22
On Jun 3, 7:04 pm, BillW50 <Bill...(a)aol.kom> wrote:
> On 6/3/2010 3:18 PM, Jeff wrote:
>
> > My brother has purchansed a Dell Laptop Inspiron. It doesn't come with
> > a docking station and he would like one. Dell quoted a Targus docking
> > station that plugs into the USB port. The docking station then
> > supports 4 usb ports (for like the keyboard, mouse, Printer, ect) and
> > also two video ports. One VGA and one DVI. All this is supposed to
> > work just fine with only One usb port plugged into the laptop. It
> > seems like there is gonna be a slow down in response expecially if he
> > does something with demanding graphics. The laptop has a seperate
> > Graphics card and I figure that he will be loosing at least some
> > resolution by runing it through the usb port instead of the graphics
> > port. Dell has said their would be no problem. Does that make sense?
> > Running a keyboard, mouse, printer, and video through just one usb
> > port on the laptop? Does anybody have experience with this type of
> > docking station and how well it really works?
>
> I don't buy it for a second! One USB port is only good for 480Mbits/sec.
> You can attach all you want too. But the total can never be over than
> 480Mbits/sec. And one USB2 can't even keep up with the video at all. Let
> alone anything else he wants to run off of the other 4 USB ports. This
> one port is USB2, right?
>
> --
> Bill
> Thunderbird Portable 3.0 (20091130)

Yes it is a USB 2 port.
From: William R. Walsh on 4 Jun 2010 11:45
Hi!

> Does anybody have experience with this type of
> docking station and how well it really works?

They do work reasonably well. The built in video will work very well
for a lot of things, but I would expect it to fall down under heavy
load (such as a game) because the normal connection between a graphics
processor and the rest of the system has much more speed available to
it than does the USB bus. (In fact, PCI Express and AGP both have a
dedicated direct path to and from the north bridge in a given system.
A USB controller is on the PCI bus, which already has less bandwidth
available to it, and it competes for bus time just like every other
PCI device in the system.)

If you want a docking station that offers "native" graphics speed, the
only real choice is to obtain a laptop that offers such an option.
Dell's Latitude systems usually do support docking stations, and you
can pick them up on eBay very cheaply.

There are big ones that support the installation of a PCI card and
little ones that are only "port replicators". As far as I know, both
types have power supplies built in.

William
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