Will a new laptop be compatible with my SD cards?

Will a new laptop be compatible with my SD cards?

Q I’m considering buying the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 laptop, recommended on Issue 615’s Buy It page. However, I’m wondering if I can use my existing collection of SD cards with it, as it takes the mini version? Also, I have some mice and keyboards that I don’t think are compatible with the more recent USB connectors. How would I connect these?

Ryland Morgan

A We’ll start with the USB question, as that will help us answer your SD card concern.

The Yoga Slim 7 model we featured has two newer Type-C (or USB-C), sockets. These will be physically incompatible with many existing USB devices but, increasingly, newer devices are likely to use this standard. However, it also has two USB 3.0 ports that use the traditional, rectangular USB-Type A socket. These will be compatible with very many older USB devices, be they printers, keyboards, mice or pretty much anything else.

That brings us to the Slim 7’s memory card slot, which is indeed microSD – so full-size SD cards simply will not fit. However, with four USB ports available, that’s really not much of a problem.

You can buy multi-format memory card readers that’ll plug into any one of the Type-A or Type-C ports, and allow you to make use of larger SD cards. The pictured Beikell model, for example, costs around £9 ( www.snipca.com/39642, pictured above).