Legacy-Free PC

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What Does Legacy-Free PC Mean?

A legacy-free PC is a computer that does not have certain kinds of ports or disk drives. Specifically, legacy-free PCs and hardware devices lack the serial and parallel ports used on traditional, or "legacy", computers. The assessment of legacy-free PC designs is important in looking at how various computers of different ages can be connected or share information.

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Techopedia Explains Legacy-Free PC

The critical change in technology that has led to the evaluation of legacy-free PCs is the evolution of the USB connection method, which has been dominant for quite a while in the hardware industry as a whole. Newer computers, as well as other devices, rely almost exclusively on USB connections rather than the types of legacy ports discussed above. Because of this fundamental change, it can be extremely difficult to network legacy and non-legacy devices, or to upgrade larger systems to accommodate only the newer kind of technology.

Industry experts also point out that the term legacy-free PC and other descriptions of legacy technology rely on the current definition. In other words, a technology that’s on the cutting-edge of its industry at a certain time will eventually become legacy technology, where even newer systems have replaced it and made it obsolete. The term legacy is also very important in the world of data handling, where changes in technology can have their own enormous impact on how networks acquire, store and use data.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist
Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.