Computer Skills Course: Ports, Connectors, Cables HD

Free Computer Skills Course: Learn about the different types of ports and connectors on a computer. Transcript: All of these peripherals need a way to connect to the CPU, so let’s take a look at the different types of ports and connectors. First is the most common of all: USB. USB stands for Universal Serial Bus, and it’s a type of connector found not only on computer peripherals, but on gaming consoles, TVs, DVD and Blu-Ray players, car audio systems… USB is everywhere. When you see a port that looks like this on the back of a computer, that’s a USB port. It’s worth mentioning that the USB port on the device that you want to connect might look different from this; there are actually a number of different USB connector types. Here’s a quick look at some of them. One of the bummers about all of these USB connectors is that if you try to plug them in upside down, they won’t work; this is why the newest version of USB, called ‘USB C’ is a very welcome change; it’s reversible, so it doesn’t matter which way you plug it in. Another significant port on the back of a computer is the Ethernet port. The Ethernet port allows you to plug in an Ethernet cable, which can connect your computer to a network and to the internet. Now, to connect your computer to a monitor, there are several possibilities. For many years, the 15-pin VGA port was the standard, and you’ll still sometimes see it in use today on old computers and projectors. This type of connector, however, is limited in terms of the screen resolution that it can support, which is something we’ll talk more about later, but for this reason, it is generally not found on new products anymore. Next is the DVI port, which comes in a few different variations, some of which suffer from the same limitations as the VGA connector. For this reason, this type of connector is also becoming less common. By far the most common connector for connecting a display, whether it’s a computer monitor or a widescreen TV, is a HDMI. HDMI is fully digital, and it supports high resolution displays and can also carry audio. You’ll find HDMI ports on just about every new TV and computer monitor. HDMI cables and connectors come in a few different sizes, in order to accommodate different sized devices. The final video connector we’ll take a look at is called “DisplayPort”. DisplayPort isn’t as common as HDMI, but hopefully it will be soon, because it is actually better in a couple of ways, supporting even higher resolutions and frame rates. Displayport comes in two sizes, and if you’re a Mac user, you’ll probably recognize the smaller of the two, called mini display port. Speaking of Macs, it’s worth noting that the mini display port on newer Macs is actually also a Thunderbolt port, which is indicated by the little lightning bolt symbol. Thunderbolt is a type of connection created by Apple that is very high speed and allows you to connect many devices to just one port. Turning to audio, we’ve got our standard 3.5mm head