Wired Cola

At my place of work, we buy a fair number of Toshiba laptops. As mainstream Windows laptops go, they're fine. They don't catch fire very often, they have all the mod cons, they don't offend. We bought a fairly nice one for a user who had specific needs, a Toshiba Satellite X200. It's fairly big and has a nice WSXGA display. WSXGA? Please note that even nerds neither say nor understand "WSXGA." But never mind. It's the accessories that are making me write this.

Behold the Toshiba Dynadock. It's a USB "docking station" (aka "port replicator", aka "dock") for a Toshiba laptop. A docking station is the lazy way to quickly connect a laptop to a keyboard, mouse, external monitor, and network port. They probably made more sense in the bad old days of PS/2 mice, where if you plugged the mouse into the computer directly, you'd need to reboot for it to work.

In the old days, the most common way to connect a docking station to a laptop was through a proprietary docking connector. The laptop would click in, and voilà, you'd get all your devices. For especially small laptops, the docking station might even add ports your laptop didn't ordinarily have.

Now it's 2008. proprietary connectors are lame, and docking stations cost too much and are too laptop-specific. Enter the USB dock, which does the same job using a single USB connection, which is nice and easy, and works with almost any laptop.

This is perilous, because a USB doesn't have unlimited bandwidth, and trying to multiplex a video signal, network signal, and whatever other stuff is hooked to your dock bangs up against the limits of USB. In the case of bad docking stations, you'll see fun stuff like displays that stop refreshing properly when the network is especially active.

The Dynadock isn't a bad USB dock, it's a comically bad USB dock. Here's what it does:

The X200 laptop, which this dock is specified for, uses a non-Basic version of Windows Vista, which means it has Windows Aero, the shiny-happy needs-extra-graphical-power user interface.

The Dynadock does not support Windows Aero. If you want to use the video connector on the dock, you have to turn off the nice graphics.

The Dynadock routinely loses track of the perfectly ordinary USB keyboard plugged into it. So the user sometimes has to unplug and re-plug the keyboard after docking the computer.

What we thus have is a dock that forces you to plug the monitor directly into the laptop using its own connector, and which often requires you to unplug and re-plug the keyboard upon docking. Given that the user's mouse is a wireless one, and the receiver is permanently attached to the laptop, that means the dock is functioning as a glorified network connector. And the list price is $180.

The Dynadock is such a terrible technology it is not even wrong. It is the Basil Fawlty of docking stations, witlessly sabotaging every useful function it could provide. Its best feature is its looks, and it looks like a bookend designed for a post-literate world. It works like one, too. It is terrible. It is, by its fiendish incompetence, one of the most comically rotten impractical jokes ever foisted on an innocent public by a name-brand computer maker. If you read the customer reviews, you will see that it fails in just about every other function you might desire from a docking station.