|
A USB hub is a dingus you plug into a USB port to turn it into multiple ports. It's usually a little flat box with a cable that goes to your computer and four (sometimes seven, rarely more) USB ports on the sides of it. Some of them are powered -- that is, they have a wall wart that plugs in to supply auxiliary power to them -- and some are not; they just use the power supplied by the computer. It's the latter that can drain your Reader battery, as I found out the hard way.
If you're hooking it directly into your computer (laptop or desktop), you're fine. Well, unless you're like me and have some ports that are the old USB 1.1 instead of 2.0, in which case the computer (aside from transferring data really slowly) will sometimes randomly refuse to admit that the Reader exists. Remember that most computers shut off their USB ports when they go into sleep/suspend/whatever mode, as part of their power management, which is most likely to be a problem with the laptop.
I have an official Sony charger (thanks to a relative, a Christmas gift card, and a moment of self-indulgence) and I find that it's much faster than charging off USB. However, since in either case charging generally involves plugging it into something once every week or two, it's really not a big deal either way.
|