Verified answer

Um.. NO.

Don't listen to the previous poster, He/she must be a PC novice. No offense to them.

He/She has Parallel and serial ports confused with Parallel ATA and Serial ATA hard drive interfaces. Both of which cannot be plugged in the wrong way, and I would trust a novice with either of them as there is no way you can damage your pc by plugging a SATA or PATA cable in incorrectly.

The external Parallel port was originally used for Printers, zip drives and scanners..

Serial ports were used for SOME Game controllers, External Dial up modems, early GPS devices and other low bandwidth data transfer devices.

Both these ports are in the process of being Phased out as their transfer rates are slow and they are not hot-swappable.

USB or Universal Serial Bus has pretty much eliminated the need for either of these ports. But there are still alot of old devices that people want to be able to use. So most new computers still come with them.

They are for connecting hard drives. Parallel is the older standard, and uses a ribbon-wire and pin system. Serial is newer, and looks a bit like the cable candy you can buy. It is quicker and more efficient. They plug into your motherboard, and the other end goes into a hard drive inside your PC. If you're a PC novice, best to stay away.

~M