Ports

[druiaghtagh]

What actually are computer ports please and why so many, could you not have just the one for your modem to connect to the internet through?

[Mattk]

ports are sockets for connections. why so many ? to ensure you have plenty of room for upgrades etc etc once u plug in gfx cards,sound cards etc etc they soon go !

[stevie21]

Are they a physical part of your computer or just a virtual way of using lots of different applications online simultaneously? I thought that they were just a way of directing internet traffic to lots of different programs/processes on your PC.

[OBonio]

There are I/O ports which are used to communicate with hardware. For instance, the old SoundBlaster cards were generally assigned port 0x220 to 0x230 and information could be written to and read from these ports to control the card. There are also the ports in the TCP/IP stack which are virtual end points for communication over the internet. Do a netstat -a in a cmd shell to see what connections your computer has open at any one time. There are a total of 65536 potential ports. Programs like P2P file sharing use multiple connections to different peers so as to get a higher number of users from the network.

[druiaghtagh]

Thankyou for all your answers, much appreciated