Startech Docking Station–One plug to bind them all

It’s been a few years since I went mostly mobile. I have a big desktop machine at home, but I only use it when I want to do some space heating, or move some dust around the room. The rest of the time I plug my laptop into network, keyboard, mouse, display, external hard disk and power supply each time I arrive home. It’s a bit of a pain to be honest. Whet I really want is a box which lets me do the connecting thing, but with one cable.

That’s what the Startech Universal Docking station lets me do.A single high speed USB 3 connection gives me keyboard, screen and all the other gubbins except power. It seems to work too. The video connection uses a technology called DisplayLink and lets me connect two external monitors to my lovely Microsoft Surface. There is some cunning compression involved in sending the video, but it seems to work fine with office productivity and software development, along with watching videos. It also makes arriving somewhere a lot easier. I’ve persuaded the folks at work to get me one for the office, and I think I’ll pretty soon have one for home use.