Originally Posted By: wfaulk
You can get honest-to-god UART-based PC Card serial ports, which, I've been told, work pretty consistently. Not that that solves the "lugging it around" problem. Or the "laptops won't have PC Card slots much longer" problem.

There are probably equivalent parallel port PC Cards, too.

I use my old desktop for the devices that need a proper UART serial port and real parallel port. Thankfully the things I need to use with my laptop all work okay (so far) with a USB to serial dongle.

My VAIO actually has a CardBus slot and a ExpressCard 34 slot which is a bit odd. Sony bundle a combo memory card reader for the ExpressCard slot. The first time I saw it I thought eh? Sony have some bizarre custom slot just to fit in a card reader device? Sony being Sony, the laptop actually has a built in MemoryStick slot in the side as well. It would have been easier and nicer to just have the combo reader built in...

ExpressCard doesn't help because most ExpressCard devices are actually USB based ones. Not seen many that use the PCI Express part of it yet.