Making connections

For years, there’s been a kind of comfortable familiarity about personal computers.

Although they kept getting faster and adding new capabilities, the basics stayed the same. If you wanted to connect another device to your computer, you plugged it in through the serial, parallel or SCSI ports. If you wanted to save files, the options were your hard disk or a floppy disk, or maybe a tape or cartridge.

Now it seems everything is changing. USB, FireWire and a proliferation of storage devices have provided new options but also made it harder to know what to look for in new equipment. To help sort through the confusion, here’s a look at some of the new choices.

USB, which stands for universal serial bus, is a new standard for devices attached to computers: everything from mice to disk drives.

It used to be that when connecting a new device to your computer, you had to turn it off in order to protect your equipment. Otherwise, a static shock could roast its delicate electronics. With USB, you can now add new devices while the computer is on, which makes it more convenient and foolproof.

If you are upgrading to a computer that is equipped only with USB ports, remember that you will either need to upgrade any other equipment that needs to be attached to the computer, or you may need to buy adapters. The adapters are expensive (most in the $40 to $80 range), so you might be better off replacing your other equipment.

FireWire is an even more recent arrival than USB. It’s a fast standard that lends itself especially well to video and multimedia (for example, digital video equipment) as well as high rates of transfer between hard disks.

In addition to speed, it makes it possible to daisy-chain up to 63 devices together.

For more details about these and other technologies and terms that you may encounter, a good place to look online is whatis.com. It’s an alphabetical listing of some of the most common yet confusing techno-terms you’re likely to encounter.