Dell D/Port Advanced Port Replicator for the Latitude D series

Although Dell packed a lot of features into this D/Port Advanced Port Replicator for the Latitude D Series of notebook PC’s, they didn’t make it too user friendly. I foresee some people have major problems with this thing. Keep reading and I’ll explain why.

A port replicator is a device that connects to a laptop and gives it the same type of ports that a regular desktop machine would have. With so many things going to USB these days, I think port replicators are becoming obsolete unless you have a lot of old or uncommon hardware. Why spend $150 on one of these when you can buy a 4-port USB expansion hub for less than 10 bucks?

Dell did at least load this port replicator up with a bunch of ports. It has 4 USB ports, which work in addition to the two on each side of the Latitude notebooks. It does block any of the ports on the back of the laptop, so keep this in mind when considering your expandability. You might be gaining four, but you’re also losing a couple on the back of the PC. It also comes with 2 PS/2 connectors, which are usually used for connecting a keyboard and/or mouse. There’s a serial cable connector, which is something hardly ever used by most people on a PC these days, plus a parallel port which is also slowly becoming obsolete. If you have an older printer, it may only connect via parallel port.

I was impressed by all the video ports on this replicator. In addition to the standard VGA-out, it also supports DVI and S-Video, meaning you could easily hook your laptop up to a TV or even an HDTV with the DVI. Too bad Dell didn’t include the cables for doing so. There are also connectors for headphones and a microphone, plus another for a modem and network line.

I suppose the main benefit to having this docking station is that it lets you plug all your stuff into it instead of your laptop, meaning you can undock your laptop and go without having to pull a bunch of cables out of it. It all depends on how many peripherals you keep connected. It also lets you connect a regular mouse, keyboard, and monitor to your laptop so that it can work like a desktop PC. I have seen too many cases where people spent all this money to hook up a rig like this, then never undocked their laptop to use anywhere other than their desk. For what they spent, they could have just gotten a desktop system with a lot more power and features.

The problem I had with this port replicator comes when you want to ‘undock’ the computer. Undocking is just a fancy word for disconnecting the laptop from the port replicator. With this particular model, you can’t just unhook your laptop or else it’ll cause all kinds of weird problems. Instead, you have to hit a button on top of the port replicator, then wait a few seconds before you disconnect. It sounds like a simple thing, but how many people are going to forget this and just lift their Latitude notebook right off the port replicator? All you have to do is press a lever and the laptop pops right off.

If you undock your PC without first hitting the button, your machine will go into a standby mode. You can recover from this, but the process of going into standby and coming out of it usually takes several long seconds and causes some novice users to panic because they think their computer is ‘frozen’. If you undock without pressing the button, then redock it real quick, your computer will really be ‘frozen’ and it won’t respond to the mouse, keyboard, or anything. In this case, you just have to press and hold the power button until it shuts off. I found this ‘feature’ to be completely insane and unacceptable.

I work in PC technical support and was very reluctant to even give this port replicator to the end user because I’m worried about them having problems with it. I don’t order the parts for new computers, but I am going to recommend not getting another one of these if we do order any more of the Latitude series notebooks. The whole docking and undocking process is unnecessarily troublesome.