The usb serial adapter and other devices
For most new computer users, the name serial port will probably mean nothing. Yet, there was a time when the serial port was the USB port in terms of speed and flexibility. The advent of USB and plug’n’play effectively destroyed the serial port and made it more or less obsolete. The usb serial adapter offers connectivity to one or a maximum of sixteen serial port based devices from a single USB port.Depending on the adapter you choose, you can get up to 921,600 bps in transfer speeds.
However, if you have a laptop with no USB ports to spare, there is a solution for you. PCMCIA Serial Cards or pci serial cards as they are sometimes mistakenly called, are quite useful and versatile. They offer connectivity to a maximum of 4 devices and can match the speeds of the USB adapters as well.
A video splitter is a very useful gadget especially when it comes to presentations.Imaging that you are making a presentation in a large hall; putting up a giant screen which is 40 feet by 20 feet may not be practical at all. Instead, you can have lots of smaller screens (projector screens or monitors) positioned in strategic locations all over the hall. A single video splitter can split a signal into 8 replicated streams. However, you can cascade several of these devices together and send out the signal to many more device (more than 100). The best part about this is that these devices are very cheap to buy.