A display latch and an IrDA port are located on the front panel of the HP Compaq notebook. The following things are located on the notebook’s left panel:

• A Kensington lock;
• An RJ-45 network connector;
• An RJ-11 modem connector;
• An S-Video output;
• A FireWire port;
• One USB port;
• A PC Card slot for two cards of type I or II;
• A smart-card reader;
• A SecureDigital card-reader;
• And vent holes.

The right panel of this notebook carries the following:

• A serial port;
• An optical DVD/CD-RW drive (the eject button isn’t very handy – it is closer to the rear panel of the notebook and is too deeply sunken into the surface);
• Two USB ports;
• A microphone input;
• A hole of the integrated microphone (which is very sensitive, by the way);
• A line audio output.

At the rear panel there are:

• A D-Sub connector for an external monitor
• A power connector

At the bottom of the HP Compaq nx8220 you can see the cover of the memory and hard drive cells, a battery cell, a connector for an additional accumulator, a connector for a dock station or port-replicator, a visiting-card holder, and vent holes.

The following table compares the communicational capabilities of the two notebooks: