Thanks to all who replied, to either this thread or my other related one, "Speed of USB ports on Inspiron 1501".
In that other thread, I point out that I decided to buy a Wavlink 3.0 docking station (with HDMI, DVI, and VGA video outputs) (on sale today at Newegg) and a dual USB 3.0 ExpressCard on ebay (for under $10). Thanks to Dave Christensen for pointing out the throughput I'd need for VGA 1080p (187 MB/s at 30 fps) -- I'm hoping that won't really be a problem as I don't plan to use graphic intensive applications on the laptop, although I'm not sure whether it will be a problem -- I'll be using things like kate, kmail, and then command line stuff to work on some programs.
