Hi, Elmer, and thanks. I'm happy to find you still here. I remember that you have helped me before!

An extension cord would be fine, but (perhaps this is just my ignorance) the USB extension cords I have found on Amazon appear to have just one port in them and I was hoping to find a hub so that I could also move a few other USB plug-ins--like the mouse and keyboard--to a more accessible location than the back of this old Win 7 computer. The space where I can keep it and use it is so limited.

There are some hubs with no charging functions that have more than one port for plugging in USBs, like the Aceele USB Hub 3.0 Splitter, but when I check their one- or two-star reviews, they all seem to have faults that scare me off. Somewhere, there ought to be a USB extension hub that I could trust--or is that a forlorn hope?

Get a combo wireless keyboard and mouse set - they come with a small dongle that you plug into a USB socket and it stays there to handle communications with the two devices.

Then get a USB extension cord and you're ready to go. Or, get a new PC!

Thanks, but my problem isn't that the PC doesn't have enough USB ports; it's that I want to be able to have at least one USB extension port that I can keep and use in a place more accessible than the back of the PC tower. My problem is with an old PC I am making use of in the living room--mostly for offline stuff, since Microsoft is not supporting Windows 7 any more. I have a more up-to-date and accessible Win 10 PC in another room, so I don't need to go so far as buying a new one. I'm just trying to get some more use out of the old one, which still performs fine.

I guess I'll stop paying so much attention to all the reviews of USB extensions and just buy any one of them, since my main focus is just on being able to plug and unplug flash drives. If the extension I buy should die an early death, it wouldn't be a great financial loss. It's just that I hate to buy something unreliable.

With desktop PCs, the trend is away from cord clutter rather than adding more. Especially a consideration for one in a living room - that's why so many wireless peripherals are now available.

Two other approaches to consider - many routers have USB sockets, to which any type of storage device should be able to be attached and accessed from any PC on your home network. Or, a wrinkle of the same thing, do you have your home PCs "networked"? It's easy to share drives and folders among PCs. Files contained in a folder(s) or drive(s) on one PC can be access by or copied to another under program controle or using Windows Explorer (the normal way to find and manipulate files. I do this as a normal practice among PCs in my house.

Good luck

Elmer, Somehow I missed your last post. Sometimes I rely too much on my iPad, and I find that it is not completely reliable about showing emails. I happened to some across this thread this evening and want to report that I finally went with the following:

• 4 Port USB Hub 3.0, HOYOKI USB Splitter for Laptop,Ultra Slim Data USB Hub with 3.3ft Extended Cable, which I got on Amazon.
• It has worked so well that I bought another one for my husband's PC as well. Our modem/router is not near enough to the PCs to make it convenient for plugging in flash drives, and one of the towers is also inconveniently positioned. However, we have found that these little thin hubs work out very nicely when kept on a (physical) desktop, where they can be moved around to suit the "mess situation.

I always gain some knowledge that I didn't have before when I read one of your comments, so I appreciate them. You have so much more experience than I do. We don't have our home PCs networked, so that when there is a problem--a virus, say--with one PC, then we can use the other to google questions and try to fix it. With the deadlines on translating jobs (now only editing other people's translations), we can't afford to have any PC "downs" without a spare to do the work on.

Hoping you have been, and are still, well.

Thanks, I'm flattered but a bit embarrassed by your generous comments. I'm not more than an intermediate level user who, now like you on this topic, can share past experiences.