Knowing my ports on my Inspiron 5520

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NorthernMan

Honorable
Aug 11, 2014
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My Windows 7 device manager in my Inspiron 5520, says that my Intel Centrino Bluetooth is associated with "Port_#0005.Hub_#0003." What is a hub as distinct from a port? There are some icons next to some ports but they are either too small for me to make out (senior citizen) or I don't understand them. What are the names or numbers of the ports on the 5520 and what is each for?
 
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There are two kinds of ports - physical and logical. This is just a guess but I think the Bluetooth radio is probably attached to a USB hub chip on the mobo to communicate with the system. Your physical USB ports on the outside of the case also connect to that USB hub but it actually supports more USB ports than are physically present so the designers used one of them for the Bluetooth connection. The hub acts as a sort of traffic director for the data from/to all the USB ports.

The numbers are probably assigned either in the hardware or by the operating system when it starts up and they link the hardware to the software drivers for each device so the data traffic goes to/from the correct software handling routines.

device<-->external...
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thx1138v2

Splendid
Jun 18, 2011
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There are two kinds of ports - physical and logical. This is just a guess but I think the Bluetooth radio is probably attached to a USB hub chip on the mobo to communicate with the system. Your physical USB ports on the outside of the case also connect to that USB hub but it actually supports more USB ports than are physically present so the designers used one of them for the Bluetooth connection. The hub acts as a sort of traffic director for the data from/to all the USB ports.

The numbers are probably assigned either in the hardware or by the operating system when it starts up and they link the hardware to the software drivers for each device so the data traffic goes to/from the correct software handling routines.

device<-->external port<---->\/
device<-->external port<------->hub<-->chipset<-->system
bluetooth signal<-->radio<-->/\

Or something like that.
 
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