13 Disappearing Laptop Ports And How To Get Them Back

You can still find a few laptops that come with built-in DVD or Blu-ray burners, but it’s a dwindling number. Apple offers just one MacBook that has an optical drive, and it hasn’t been updated since 2012. Even if you find a modern laptop with an optical drive — the 5.2-pound Lenovo Ideapad 500, for example — you’re getting a large, bulky system. A better solution is to buy an external DVD drive that connects to your USB port, like the $24 LG GP60NB50 (opens in new tab). External Blu-ray burners are more expensive; the Samsung TSST SE-506CB (opens in new tab), for example, costs $100. Image: Shutterstock The rectangular USB Type-A port, which can be powered by either USB 2 or USB 3, remains commonplace on today’s laptops, but it’s slowly starting to disappear. The new, USB Type-C port is thinner, it’s reversible, it can transmit video data via its “alt mode” and it can charge your laptop. A handful of today’s laptops, including the Apple MacBook and HP EliteBook Folio G1, have only the new USB Type-C port, but it won’t be long before a lot more models follow. If your laptop has Type-C only, you can get an adapter such as the $6.99 Cable Matters (opens in new tab) USB Type-C male to Type-A female cable or pick up a hub like the $21 CableCreation hub, which has USB Type-A, HDMI and microUSB. Image: Shutterstock The DeLorean of ports, FireWire is a high-end interface that, in its heyday, was expensive and popular only with a limited crowd. Launched in 1994 and improved a few times after, the connector also known as IEEE 1394 was used mainly by video editors for connecting high-speed external hard drives and cameras. Steve Jobs officially declared the standard dead in 2008, but what if you still have a FireWire device you need to use in 2016? You can get a simple $6 IEEE 1394-to-USB adapter such as the Vktech adapter (opens in new tab) for $6. Image: Wikipedia If you used a PC in the 1980s or most of the 1990s, your mouse and external modem plugged into a serial port, sometimes referred to as an RS-232 interface. While most of us have moved on to the USB (Universal Serial Bus), there are still some businesses that rely on point-of-sale systems or bar-code readers that need this connector. A handful of business laptops, including the HP ProBook 650, are available with serial ports on board. However, if you don’t have the connector on your notebook, you can get an adapter such as the TRENDnet TU-S9 (opens in new tab) for under $15. Image: Shutterstock No matter how speedy and reliable your wireless network is, the wired alternative is always just a bit better. This maxim goes double for hotel internet, where the signal in your room can have one bar while the wire on the desk gives you full connectivity. While some mainstream business laptops still come with Ethernet ports that can connect you to a wired network, you won’t find this connector on most consumer laptops or superslim workhorses such as the X1 Carbon. You can pick up a USB-to-Ethernet dongle for under $10, but you better make sure you don’t leave home without it. Image: Shutterstock Before USB became popular, most people connected to their printers via parallel port, a standard that originated in 1970 and appeared on the first IBM PC in 1981. A number of laptops came with parallel ports on them so they could connect to printers or a handful of storage devices, including ZIP drives and tape backup units, that connected using the connector also known as IEEE 1284. Believe it or not, some people still have parallel-port printers. I still love my HP Laserjet 5p from 1997, and it still works really well. To connect to it today, I have to either use a USB-to-parallel port cable like the $7.99 Sabrent CB-CN36 (opens in new tab) or a parallel port to Ethernet adapter like the TP-LINK TL-PS110P (opens in new tab) that will allow me to attach the printer directly to my router and access it on the network. Image: Shutterstock Before USB 3.0 became popular, a number of laptops in the late 2000s and early 2010s shipped with eSATA (external SATA) ports that promised much faster connections to external hard drives than plain old USB could offer. For example, a Seagate FreeAgent XTreme we tested in 2009 got a transfer rate of 40.2 MBps over eSATA but just 28.4 MBps over USB 2.0. If you still have an eSATA hard drive, it’s easy but a little pricey to get a cable that goes from eSATA to USB 3.0. The StarTech USB32SESATA3 (opens in new tab), for example, goes for $27. Image: Wikipedia A lot of mainstream business laptops come with mini DisplayPorts, because they can output to up to three monitors when paired with a splitter. But what do you do if your monitor takes DisplayPort but your new laptop doesn’t have mini DP-out? You can’t reasonably (not without a an expensive converter) go from HDMI-out on your laptop to DisplayPort-in on a screen, even though the opposite (DP to HDMI) is easy. Our advice: Get a USB-to-DisplayPort adapter, such as the Plugable DL-5500 (opens in new tab). If your laptop uses USB Type-C, you can get a single cable like the $19.95 Plugable USB-C to DisplayPort adapter (opens in new tab). Image: Wikipedia I’m probably alone in this feeling, but I actually miss ExpressCard, a laptop port that let you add new functionality by putting an expansion card into a slot on the side of your laptop. ExpressCard 34 and 54 (two different sizes) were the last versions of this port, but earlier iterations of this same concept were called PC cards or PCMCIA cards. ExpressCard was faster than the USB connections of its time, and more importantly, it slipped inside your computer, allowing you to add functionality without the need for an external device or dongle. People often used PC or ExpressCards to add Ethernet, Wi-Fi or a 56K modem to laptops that didn’t have them. If you have any of these cards, SIIG makes an $18 ExpressCard to USB adapter (opens in new tab), but I’m not sure why you’d want to use your old modem or 802.11b Wi-Fi card with your new laptop. Image: Shutterstock Made for connecting keyboards and mice, PS/2 ports date all the way back to 1987, when they made their debut on IBM’s PS/2 computer. Computer users preferred the small, round connectors to the bulky serial ports used by most mice and the giant DIN connectors that powered most keyboards of the time. Though most people use USB keyboards and mice today, some keyboard gamers and discerning typists still like PS/2 better, because it never suffers from delays or ghosting when you’re hitting a lot of keys quickly. While you can’t get the PS/2 interface on your laptop, you can make that old IBM keyboard in your closet work with your new computer by purchasing a very inexpensive dongle such as the $2.49 StarTech adapter (opens in new tab). Image: Wikipedia