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Everything comes with USB these days.I realize it may be a coincidence, but others have reported the hub damaging their machine, so all I can say is BEWARE. In the process of installing the new hub, I discovered two of the four built-in USB ports on my machine no longer work. Logging off and back on, or rebooting, did the trick, but it was odd.Then I started getting error messages about an unidentifiable USB device not working. And because of errors, I am having trouble getting work done. It seemed to work fine at first.
When I get some time, I need to see if I can disable the on-board USB and put a USB card in one of the slots -- if they even make those anymore. I could never figure out what was giving the message, so I disable error messages for USB devices.Then I read the crappy reviews here and decided to replace the hub. But then I started getting odd errors when I booted the computer. I bought one of these at the store. A black bar would appear over the icon tray and Explorer would never finish loading.
At this point, it appears that the error messages are caused by the on-board USB chips.
This hub works great and the location of the inputs are in the right place. I also love the colored LEDS.
And now, my digital camera -- connected and tested, working fine too. The lights in the center of the hub blink constantly in a rotating Christmas light fashion. Would just be nice if the laptop was smarter about that. I do think if I had this in my sleeping space, it would probably bother me.It was cheap, it's cute, and it works for me.
I found space for it on the end of the power bar.What I don't care about:The lights aren't indicator lights for data activity. (But I have Christmas money here, so I had to buy here. Red-green-blue fast, then slow, then erratic. (If things change over time, I'll post an addendum).:A self-powered hp officejet printer -- tested and working.A wireless logitech usb mouse -- no lag.My laptop cooling pad -- the only bummer here being that I have to unplug the pad when I put the laptop to sleep. That's because I went to Newegg and found good reviews on it. Sorry, Newegg, you're number one in my book still). But I have to do that when I have it connected directly to the laptop, as well. No complaints from any of the hardware or software.
This isn't in my bedroom, so it's cool. Okay, so I read the other reviews before taking a chance on this thing. I have no complaints, and I really dig the lights.What I have on it -- all of which works fine with the hub. The power supply is candy-bar thin, but a bit of a PITA, on account of its want to go sideways instead of long-ways into the plug.
Nice to have seven ports, but each is lighted a different color, that's ok.sort of, but there's a center light that changes color and twinkles and is VERY distracting. I could do without the light show.
It just wasn't delivering enough juice.Also, absolutely don't expect to get good throughput connecting a hard drive to this. The port connectors wiggle around, and despite how nice it looks lit up, it won't provide very much power to your devices. I repeated this experiment several times with different hard drives plugged into different ports here, all while the Sabrent hub was plugged into the USB adapter as well.On Windows, I also ran into confusion and crashes when trying to plug too many devices in at the same time. The general consensus is correct. Spend a few bucks more and get a better hub -- after reading other reviews, I've got a Cables To Go one on the way, and hope it fares much better than this poorly-manufactured nonsense. For example, I tried to plug in a mix of 5 devices, including a bus-powered synth keyboard, and I noticed the lights went out on some of the connected gadgets.
I don't know if this is a broader Windows problem or limited to poor-quality USB hubs like this, but it was very tiring to repeatedly restart and incrementally add devices, instead of being able to do them one after another.Please save your time and energy. I wish I had read these reviews before getting this. Yes, it's cheap, but it's unreliable and flimsy. The "High Speed" claim is deceptive and inaccurate: I could only attain USB 1.1 speeds.
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