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Add a USB Port to Your Notebook

USB BusPort Mobile expands aging notebooks, but older models might be out of luck.

Lincoln Spector, special to PC World

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Notebooks aren't known for their expandability. You're pretty much stuck with what you originally bought. But now Belkin Components is helping them grow a little with the USB BusPort Mobile, which plugs into a PC Card slot and gives you a pair of Universal Serial Bus ports.

To be fair, Belkin isn't the first company marketing a notebook USB device. ADS Technologies has been selling its two-port PC Card plug-in, the USB Port (CardBus), for months.

Belkin's USB BusPort Mobile lists for $99.95. Like the ADS offering, Belkin's Mobile won't work with just any PC Card slot (the slots formally known as PCMCIA), or even with any Type II slots. The device requires a CardBus, a 32-bit implementation of the PC Card that has been available in notebooks for more than a year. It works with a PowerBook running Mac OS 8.6 or higher, and for a PC it requires Windows 98 or a later version.

Belkin includes a lifetime warranty with the BusPort Mobile.

"As long as it's not gross neglect on the part of the user, we replace [the BusPort Mobile], no questions asked," promises Melody Saffery, product manager.

But the lifetime warranty won't last for your entire lifetime. When the BusPort Mobile becomes obsolete and is discontinued, according to Saffery, the lifetime is over.

Will it work with your peripherals? Anyone who has ever tried to add USB to an aging desktop has to be suspicious. Ports on ISA or PCI add-in cards have a history of trouble, often failing to run drives and other complex USB devices. The good news is that a CardBus-USB connection shouldn't have this kind of trouble.

The CardBus offers a more direct connection to the processor than a PCI card, says Mike Mihalik, vice president of engineering for LaCie, which manufactures drives--many of which connect to the USB port.

If your notebook isn't new enough to have a CardBus slot, you're out of luck. You still can't add USB to an old computer, but at least now you can add it to slightly aged one.

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