A laptop docking station can be a pretty handy thing, if you need one for your circumstances. What kind of computer user would find value in one of these things? Anyone that uses a laptop as their home computer, and also takes it with them to work or while traveling would benefit from a laptop docking station.

A laptop docking station is a small electronic device and usually your laptop will sit on top of it.
Here’s how it’s used. A lot of people use their laptop as their primary home computer, and they like to have a lot of peripheral items connected to it. These things make the laptop easier to use, and include:

a regular keyboard (I type much faster on a “normal” keyboard, rather than the one on the laptop itself)
a mouse (easier than using the touchpad on the laptop)
an external monitor (if you want the display to be bigger than the laptop’s screen)
a printer (even if your printer is wireless, a USB connection is more reliable)
an external USB hard drive
speakers (since external speakers are almost always better than the laptop’s internal speakers)

So think about that. You have all these extra devices connected to your laptop. Then, Monday morning rolls around and you have to take the laptop in to work with you. You know what that means – you have to:

disconnect the keyboard
disconnect the mouse
disconnect the monitor
disconnect the printer
disconnect the external drive
disconnect the speakers

And then when you get back home that night, you have to reconnect all of those things if you want the convenience of using them. What a pain!
If you find yourself in that situation, you could benefit from using a laptop docking station.
Instead of constantly connecting and disconnecting all of those extra items, you just plug them into the docking station. So it holds the connecting ports for your keyboard, mouse, monitor(s), printer, other drives, and speakers. And they all STAY plugged in to the docking station. Then your laptop makes a single connection to the docking station, thereby connecting to all of those other components. When you want to take your laptop out somewhere like to work or on vacation, you just disconnect it from the docking station and take it away – nothing else to disconnect. Easy!
Here’s what some other docking stations look like:

 

 

 

 
Not all laptop docking stations are set up so that the laptop sits on top of it. Some are configured such that it just connects to the laptop via a cable.
To find out if there is a docking station available for your laptop, the easiest way is to just go to eBay.com and type in your laptop’s model number followed by “docking station” (without the quotation marks). If one exists, it’s likely to pop up for sale there.
The post What is a laptop docking station? first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

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