ON COMPUTERS : All kinds of hubs out there offering ports aplenty
Posted on Monday, June 23, 2008
We often need more USB ports, especially for laptops. There are plenty of small hubs that add more ports. They’re cheap enough, and we have a couple.
There are two main types of hubs: powered and unpowered. The powered ones come with an adapter that plugs into an electrical outlet. Some devices that use USB connections, like external hard drives or scanners and printers, need more power than they can pull from the computer itself, and for these kinds of accessories it’s best to get a hub that has its own power supply. These are widely available and sell for around $ 15 to $ 30.
We recently came across one with a difference: the Ultra Buddy, which we found for $ 40 at TigerDirect. com. The difference is that it can be connected to two computers at once.
In short, the Ultra Buddy acts as what used to be called an A / B switch. This can partially substitute for a network. Two PCs can be connected to the back of the hub and up to seven USB devices can be plugged into the front. LED lights on top indicate which are in use. These can’t be used by both computers at the same time. To switch between computers, you just press a button.
If you don’t want or need to connect two computers to the same hub, you might like the DUB-H 7, a seven-port hub from D-Link that sells for around $ 20 after a $ 10 rebate at Amazon. com. An unusual feature of this hub is that it has an “upstream port” to connect to still more hubs. You can keep chaining hubs in line to connect up to 127 additional devices. We’ve never come across anyone who needed that many. The power adapters for both these hubs are the slim-line type, which means they don’t block the other sockets in a power bar when you plug them in. The fat transformers that come with most equipment are very annoying since they inevitably take up two spaces on a power bar or block the neighboring socket when plugged into a twosocket wall outlet.
NUMBERS REPORT Amazon. com now has 125, 000 book titles available for wireless download to its popular Kindle e-book reader. This is up from 90, 000 titles just a few months ago. Dozens of newspapers, magazines and blogs also have been added, including U. S. News & World Report, the International Herald Tribune and the Shanghai Daily. This whole process is interesting because of its speed and also its effect on the publishing industry. Books can usually be downloaded to the Kindle in just a few seconds and typically sell for $ 10, about one-half to one-third the price of a paper copy. A similar cost ratio applies to downloading newspapers and magazines.
The cost seems high to Bob, considering that unlike physical copies, there are almost no production costs involved. In the case of downloaded newspapers and magazines, you get the text and pictures but you don’t get the ads. This is too bad, because ads are often interesting, and readers want to see them.
A Looking Backward Note: Many years ago, during World War II, Marshall Field, the Chicago department store mogul, started a New York City daily called PM, and it carried no ads. Field thought it was unseemly to publish advertisements in a newspaper when the country was involved in a perilous war. He soon found, however, that readers were seriously annoyed by the lack of ads, and he ended up having to cover store sales and restaurant openings as if they were news stories. PM soon said good night. ONLINE HEALTH INSURANCE Ehealth. com offers choices for small businesses to set up employee health plans. Employers sign up and say how much they want to spend for each employee. It does not have to be the same for each employee, and it can be as low as $ 25 per person; there is no upper limit.
The money goes into an online savings account, and it is then up to each employee to choose a particular health plan. The choices cover more than 900 plans from 185 health-insurance carriers. The employees commit to a plan for one month, and it is renewable each month.
These accounts allow each employee to save whatever is not spent and have that accumulate in a retirement account. About 6 million Americans currently have health savings plans.
BOOKS Easy Computer Basics, Windows Vista Edition, by Michael Miller; $ 22 from informit. com / que. This is the latest in a series of lavishly illustrated instructional books from Que Publishing. Que is absolutely great at this kind of book, and this is one of the best we’ve seen on teaching novices the basics of how their computers work (with pictures ) and how they can make connections for accessories and changes to the desktop menus. Top-notch. NOTE: Readers can search several years of columns at the “On Computers” Web site: www. oncomp. com. You can e-mail Bob Schwabach at bobschwab@aol. com and Joy Schwabach at joydee@oncomp. com.
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