Universal Laptop USB Docking Station Reviews: How to Choose the Best One for You

​​If you have found yourself on this page and you are obviously reading this, then you must be thinking of ways to make your digital life more efficient. And the universal laptop USB docking station could be just the thing. In today’s digital lifestyle, almost everything and everyone has gone mobile crazy with most of us working and playing on laptops and other mobile devices. However, there are often times in one’s digital day when the small screens and limited connectivity of those mobile devices are just not adequate or efficient for the task at hand. Enter the universal laptop docking station. This relatively small device can convert just about any small-screened laptop into a powerhouse of a computer, running multiple displays and connecting to multiple devices. ​It allows us to move our digital workspace on to a far larger setup without having to do any sort of transferring of files or computer synchronisation.

So how does one go about choosing a laptop docking station? And what's the best docking station on the market? Unsurprisingly, in this new digital-everything age, the variety of laptop docking stations on offer is quite broad and deciding on the best one for you can be a bit of a daunting task. This is especially true given the diversity of technologies the docking station employs, each of which can be considered a study in its own right. In this review of laptop docking stations, we first look at the features and technologies that ​make up today’s machines and try to make clear what to look for when purchasing one. Following that, we then examine what is actually on offer to the UK consumer by taking a look at some of the actual laptop docking stations that are currently available.

​What to Look For in a Universal Laptop Docking Station

​Connection to the Computer

​Connection to External Monitors

​Probably the single most common reason for wanting to buy a laptop docking station is to be able to connect to multiple desktop screens. This is usually to make use of the increased screen real estate that larger and more numerous screens provide, so that one is not limited to the small ​display of the laptop. Additional screens are used in either mirror mode, where the laptop display is mirrored onto the external screens, or in extended mode, where the external displays act as additional desktop space adjacent to that of the laptop. Fortunately, most laptop docking stations today can function in either mirror or extended mode which is controlled by display software installed on the computer.

To facilitate the actual ​physical connections to the external screens, laptop docking stations usually carry a number of different monitor ports. In today’s display hardware, four types of monitor ports are most commonly encountered:

VGA is the oldest of the four and is now only seen on older screen hardware. DVI was developed after VGA and although still found on new hardware, is nowadays slowly becoming more of a legacy technology. DVI tends to be found primarily on computing hardware, while the next type of connection technology, HDMI, which was developed a couple of years after DVI, tends to be found primarily on TVs and other living room entertainment hardware. The latest mainstream monitor port technology today is DisplayPort and of course it incorporates the latest developments in screen connection technologies.

​The type of display port technology implemented on the laptop docking station will determine how many monitors can be connected at any one time as well as the maximum resolution each of those monitors can display, with ​more recent port connection technologies able to handle more screens at higher resolutions.  

So in general, one wants to go for the latest technologies when choosing a laptop docking station, but one also has to take in to account the types of screens that the dock will be connecting too. For instance, if much older screen hardware is at hand, getting a laptop docking station capable of connecting via VGA might make more sense (and is usually cheaper too!). Fortunately, practically all of the monitor connection technologies are, in a sense, ‘backwards-compatible’ through the use of both passive and active adaptors. Therefore, connecting to VGA using a DVI-to-VGA adapter is a common occurrence. Also common are the HDMI-to-DVI and HDMI-to-VGA adapters, and now even DisplayPort-to-VGA, -to-DVI, and -to-HDMI are not unusual, once again allowing screens with ports different to those on computing hardware to connect without a problem.

​Connection to the Internet

​Another common port seen on laptop docking stations is the ethernet port which connects the docking station to the internet via a hard-wired ethernet cable. This can provide the laptop with hard-wired access to the internet which is once again mediated through the single USB 3.0 connection to the docking station, again ​via DisplayLink technology. Today’s standard of ethernet connection on laptop docking hardware is the Gigabit connection (also commonly represented as ’10/100/1000 Mbps’) which is more than enough bandwidth to handle the data flowing over any of today’s domestic internet service provider connections in the UK, the highest speed of which is currently still only in the hundreds of Megabits.

Now why would you want an wired connection to the internet when WiFi is almost always readily available? In most situations, one actually doesn’t need it but sometimes it can provide a more stable and reliable connection to the internet particularly in cases where electromagnetic interference or distance from the router is an issue. Other reasons include speed - ethernet is currently still faster than WiFi - and security, where the extra cautious (paranoid?) few among us will take comfort in the knowledge that their wireless connection to their router cannot be intercepted by neighbourly good-for-nothings! - something that is particularly important when using ‘http://...’ prefixed websites that are not running cryptographic protocols as opposed to the more secure ‘https://…' ​ones.

Ultimately, it is usually enough just to verify that the laptop docking station under consideration has a Gigabit ethernet port as part of its specification before moving onto investigating the next feature. ​This is because the most difficult issue regarding internet access is usually how to get the wired connection to the laptop docking station in the first place!

​Connection to Other Computing Peripherals

​In addition to the display and internet ports, laptop docking stations also invariably include multiple USB ports ​to allow the connection of computing peripherals such as keyboards and mice, as well as scanners and printers, USB memory sticks, and so on. Since the range of computing peripherals ​is ​wide, one can almost never have enough USB ports, so the key here, when looking to purchase a universal laptop docking station, is that the more USB ports on the device, the merrier!

However, it is not just the number of USB ports included on the docking station that is ​relevant, it is also important to consider the USB version to which they conform. In today’s laptop docking stations one finds USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports in different quantities. USB peripherals can be plugged into either type and they should have no problem working normally since the more modern USB 3.0 specification is designed to be backwards compatible with older USB 2.0 one. However, for certain peripherals where data transfer speeds are more important, such as transferring data between hard drives, for instance, using the much faster USB 3.0 port will make a world of difference to the user. As a consequence, choosing a laptop docking station with the highest number of USB 3.0 ports available should always be aimed for.

​Audio Connections

The final category of connection ports one typically finds on today’s crop of laptop docking stations are the audio ports. Once again these are not strictly essential to the function of the computing hardware hub, but they can make the process of outputting sound from your laptop’s limited audio production capabilities on to larger and more capable sound systems a fair bit simpler. In this regard, a laptop docking station should have both a microphone jack and a headphone jack for full audio functionality.

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