Toshiba Dynadock USB Docking Station

If you use a laptop for long periods in one place (your desk, for instance), it's a good idea to plug in an external mouse and keyboard - and a monitor, if you have one - so that you're not sitting with a hunched posture all day. Connecting and disconnecting this lot each day is a bit of a bind though, which is where a docking station comes in.

Most laptop manufacturers offer optional docking stations but they only tend to work with one particular range of laptops. If you don't mind making a few small sacrifices (of which more later), a third-party dock is a cheaper solution. We had high hopes for the Belkin High-Speed Docking Station we reviewed last year, but it had a few too many limitations for our liking and the ExpressCard connection meant that it wouldn't work with all laptops. The Toshiba DynaDock, on the other hand, connects via USB - which means it'll work with anything.

The DynaDock has the same upright design as the Belkin model, but while it's not quite so good-looking, a bit more thought has gone into its design. For a start, rather than tuck every port away at the rear where they're difficult to get to, the DynaDock puts a pair of USB ports on the front, along with microphone and headphone sockets for the built-in audio.

All the other ports - the ones that'll be permanently connected to peripherals, in other words - are at the rear. Unlike the dual-port Belkin, you'll need to choose either the VGA or DVI port-equipped DynaDock, but both models have the same set of Ethernet, USB 2.0 and serial ports.

There's also an optical S/PDIF port for an audio connection, but we can't imagine that there are many laptop users with a desktop set-up that has something suitable to plug this into and we'd prefer standard set of 3.5mm audio ports (the Belkin has both options, incidentally).

The DynaDock connects to a laptop via a dedicated USB 2.0 port at the rear. It only supports resolutions up to 1280 x 1024 (the Belkin goes up to 1600 x 1200), but the DynaDock handles an external display much more adroitly. An external monitor simply appears as a second monitor to Windows and it can be set as the primary display with the laptop screen set as the secondary one - something the Belkin couldn't do. Neater still, the DynaDock utility automatically reconfigures the laptop display as the primary one when the dock is disconnected, and sets it back to secondary when it's plugged in. The DynaDock also supports ClearType - unlike the Belkin.

Despite the greater bandwidth offered by the Belkin's ExpressCard connection, its network performance was poor and heavy traffic slowed down the external display. The DynaDock, on the other hand, didn't differ much from a standard Ethernet port and while there was some display slowdown at times of heavy network traffic, it was only really noticeable when dragging around windows on the Desktop.

Given that it costs around the same as many dedicated docking stations, the DynaDock may not seem like particularly good value given that it's a compromise solution, but it's worth remembering that it will work with any laptop. You only need to switch to a different laptop once for it to have paid for itself - and not all laptops have a dedicated dock option in the first place, of course.

One final point. There are some negative reviews of the DynaDock on the Toshiba US website, where users complain of problems with the external display. This was something we couldn't reproduce and the dock behaved normally with Windows XP and Vista in our tests. Unfortunately, it's also worth noting that the DyanDock costs $135 in the US, which makes the UK price seem a bit steep in comparison.