Connectors in a laptop

When a person buys his first laptop, usually the first thing he sees is a lot of holes of various shapes across almost the entire area of ​​​​the device’s body. The store can show you where the connector for the power adapter is located, but, unfortunately, most often this is where the tour of the visible side of the laptop ends. However, without knowing the purpose of all the connectors, the user is unlikely to be able to achieve maximum performance from the device, especially if the device is equipped with modern Thunderbolt 3 outputs, etc.

Multimedia connectors

Let's look at the most popular and most necessary outputs in a laptop for the everyday tasks of the vast majority of users:

• VGA is the oldest, but sometimes still relevant, connector for outputting images to an external display.
• HDMI is a connection interface that replaced VGA and is used to connect external monitors, home theaters, projectors, etc.
• The connectors for connecting audio equipment are quite recognizable, they have a linear shape, like on many still modern smartphones. The most common of them is a 3.5 mm jack connector, thanks to which it is possible to connect wired headphones.
• Thunderbot 3 is still a rather rare type, first introduced into Apple products. This output has a bandwidth 8 times higher than that of USB 3.0 and 4 times higher than that of HDMI 1.4.This technology allows you to transmit high-resolution video without delays, connect external video cards, which is sometimes combined with the fast charging function.

Technical connectors

Now, we smoothly move on to the most frequently used group of laptop interfaces:

• USB is an abbreviation that in Russian sounds like a universal serial bus. The most common standard in the world for connecting external devices, be it a flash card, printer, smartphone, etc. Today, laptops are equipped with USB 2.0 standard ports. or 3.0. 3rd generation connectors have much higher bandwidth compared to the 2nd generation interface - 4.8 Gbit versus 480 Mbit.

• Ethernet is an interface for connecting a laptop to the Internet network via a network cable using an RJ45 connector. Today, a laptop may have several standards of this technology, differing in data transfer speed: 1 thousand BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, 10BASE-T - allowing data transfer at a speed of 10/100 Mbit or 1 Gbit per second.

Other ports

Sometimes laptops may contain ports that are very atypical for modern models, which sometimes leads the user to a state of slight amazement. One of these ports can confidently be called PS\2 and S-VHS, designed for the interfaces of very old models of computer mice and keyboards.

Also, sometimes you can find an RJ-11 port, which looks similar to RJ-45, but is intended for connecting a telephone cable.