USB is Universal Serial Bus which can be used to connect mouse, network interfaces, speakers, and many similar PC accessories.

However USB was plagued buy slow speed for applications that required good bandwidth. With the introduction of USB 2, speed problems have largely been put to rest.

USB can connect peripherals such as mice, keyboards, gamepads and joysticks, scanners, digital cameras, printers, hard disks, and networking components. For multimedia devices such as scanners and digital cameras, USB has become the standard connection method. For printers, USB has also grown in popularity and started displacing parallel ports because USB makes it simple to add more than one printer to a computer.

Firewire

FireWire is one of the fastest peripheral standards ever developed, which makes it great for use with multimedia peripherals such as digital video cameras and other high-speed devices like the latest hard disk drives and printers. Many digital cameras still come out with firewire interfaces although popular USB 2 interface is more widely installed on PCs.

Major manufacturers of multimedia devices have been adopting the FireWire technology, and for good reason. FireWire speeds up the movement of multimedia data and large files and enables easy connection of digital consumer products -- including digital camcorders, digital video tapes, digital video disks, set-top boxes, and music systems -- directly to a personal computer.

What’s in it for you? While buying PCs make sure there is USB 2 Interface on it and make sure there is plenty of it. Also desirable is firewire interface however Intel motherboards are carrying USB as standard.