Kensington Notebook Expansion Dock with Video

People sometimes prefer a desktop computer to a laptop for various reasons: the desktop PC may have a larger screen, or a better mouse and keyboard, and as such it may be less likely to give its user RSI than will a laptop perched on the user’s knees.

The Kensington Notebook Dock is designed to provide a simple way to make a laptop into something like a desktop, by connecting it to all the peripherals that a desktop PC uses such as monitor, mouse, keyboard and wired network connection.

The idea is as follows: the dock houses a VGA monitor socket, network socket, four USB sockets and headphone and microphone inputs. All of those devices must be connected to the dock, and a single USB cable then links the dock to the laptop. When it’s all connected and working, the desktop’s peripherals will become available to the laptop.

Installing the Kensington Dock’s driver from the supplied CD was a simple process and it automatically updated itself over the internet to the most recent version. Connecting our Dell test notebook to our set of peripherals through the dock also proved to be an easy task. Although getting all of the ports to function required us to restart the computer several times, we were impressed that the laptop had automatically used the correct screen resolution to work best with the big monitor we’d attached.

It’s possible to use both the laptop and desktop screens simultaneously either as a single large display or as two screens displaying the same thing. However, we needed to manually configure the dock’s network adapter to connect the computer to our wired network as its settings were not automatically transferred from the laptop.

Unfortunately, the dock doesn’t allow the peripherals to be easily reconnected to a desktop PC once they’re plugged in. For those who use both a desktop PC and a laptop, the dock will be impractical.

This left us questioning its usefulness for those who want to use both a laptop and a desktop. However, for travelling laptop users who want a more comfortable experience once they plug in at home or in the office, the Kensington Dock will make life easier.