Adding extra USB ports to a laptop

[sj33]

This isn't particularly urgent or essential, just something I've been thinking about. I have a 13" laptop, and it only has 2 USB ports - a bit of an oversight when I bought this. So far, it hasn't caused too much of a problem. One of the ports is permenently used for my Logitech VX Nano notebook mouse. In retrospect, I should have bought a Bluetooth mouse and saved the port, but at least I can leave the Bluetooth disabled on here. The other port is used for gamepad, but I have to switch the gamepad out when I want to use an external drive. Also, when I want to play 2 player games on an emulator, I have to remove the mouse dongle to connect another gamepad. A bit annoying. I do have a 4-port USB hub, but it's not really convenient.

So I've been looking at ways to add more ports. I see two ways.

1) Expresscard to USB adaptor - These range from 2 ports to 4 ports. However, they stick out the side of the laptop. Does anyone know of such a thing that sits 'plush' inside the laptop, adding 1 or 2 extra ports?

2) IEE 1394 Firewire to USB - It's the crappy little tiny port that was on the front of earlier PS2s, and is also on my laptop. I have never seen anyone actually use this thing, I don't even know what it's used for. Can you get an adaptor cable for this, to connect USB devices to the port?

Thanks in advance, I'm just musing over this, wondered if anyone had other ideas on this.

[smouty]

IEE 1394 Firewire to USB - It's the crappy little tiny port that was on the front of earlier PS2s, and is also on my laptop. I have never seen anyone actually use this thing, I don't even know what it's used for. Can you get an adaptor cable for this, to connect USB devices to the port?

Firewire is about a million time better than USB when transferring data
It is used a lot on DV cams, external drives and Macs.
You can also network with it but nobody does.

[Taka]

As smouty said, Firewire is loads better than USB2.0 though support for it has largely gone by the wayside due to licensing costs and extra expense in the hardware.

The expresscard option is probably the way forward, unless you want to go down the USB hub route.

[sj33]

Thanks for that - I've just never had a use for that port I guess! I figured that utilising that port as an extra USB port using an adaptor cable would be less clumsy than a huge dongle sticking out the Expresscard port!

I probably sound really fussy, and I am. It's just that I bought a 13" laptop to eliminate extra bloat