A
lot of modern peripherals need to be plugged into USB ports. If you aren't
sure whether you have one, look for a socket like this on the back (or
sometimes the front) of your PC. Sometimes there are 2 or more of them
together. Your choice of printers, cameras, scanners, mice, joysticks and
virtually any other peripheral is very limited nowadays if you haven't got USB.
The picture shows a type "A" USB socket. This is the socket on the
computer. There is also a type "B" connector which looks a little
different and lives on the external device.
USB stands for Universal Serial Bus and is just a fast way of transferring data
between devices. You can add more and more USB ports using 'USB hubs' in a
similar way to adding a mains adaptor plug to a mains socket.
If you've just bought a device with a USB cable and you've now discovered that
you can't plug it in to your PC, don't worry, we can probably add USB for very
little cost. Give us a call, we'll ask you a couple of simple questions about
your PC or ask to see it then we'll quote you a price.
There are now 2 versions of USB, the older one is called USB 1.1 and if a device only mentions that it wants USB then this is the version that it is talking about. The newer version is called USB 2.0 and it works a lot faster than USB 1.1 but it is backward compatible. This means that if you have USB 2.0 ports on your computer, you can plug any USB device in. When we install USB ports, we always use USB 2.0 first but if the PC is too old to work with USB 2.0, we'll try USB 1.1.