Member Login | Not a FREE member yet? Sign Up Here!

The Basic Stuff Of Computers And What To Look For When Shopping.
By: chadder

Computers are programmable electronic devices using program instructions for data manipulation: in basic terms, computers allow you do do things, communicate or get more information etc.

A computer has certain basic components. I'll try to keep this in English, hopefully:

Case: known as tower and can come in a plethora of different sizes, shapes and colors these days.

Motherboard: main board or if your really techie just say, 'board'. (:--) This is the unit that hold's everything together. If you have a car, this would be the frame that everything is bolted too.

Central Processing Unit: Known as CPU or processor, this is the little unit that does all the calculating so you can do whatever task's you'll need to do with your computer.

Random Access Memory: known as RAM or just memory. The more and the faster it runs the better.

Power Supply & adaptors: takes power from the wall and gives it to the board which powers up everything else.

Video display: VGA adapter or graphics adapter. If you'll be playing games you'll want a large one of these.

Removable Media: storage device of some sort, floppy drive, CD, DVD, Media card. This is basically anything your computer can put information on that you can walk away with.

Internal Storage: known as your hard disk or hard drive or just 'drive'. This is an extremely fast spinning device that stores all your files and your operating system.

Networking cards: if you don't know what this is you probly don't need to. It's most commonly used for connecting more than one computer together in a network or to get your computer out to the internet.

Computer Shoppers

Shop around (:--). Ask allot of questions, safest bet will be to stick to brand names. Dell, Compaq/HP is good or your local store will have there own recommendations. Basically you are going to want a computer with the largest CPU, most amount of RAM, and largest hard drive etc. Those are the most important that will effect speed. These days a decent speed tower for 2006 is 3GHZ CPU, 1 Gig Ram, 250 Gig hard disk. Basically get the biggest baddest computer possible for the least amount of donuts (dollars).

Computer technology is changing everyday. Some of the concepts and trends are explained below.

Web Server

Just a name for a computer that 'serves' out files to people that have requested them. When you visit a web page you will be requesting some computer located somewhere in the world to upload that webpage from their computer to yours. Since their files are the ones serving the files to you they are called 'web servers'. Sort of like when you are on MSN and you send a picture of someone from your computer to theirs. In this case your computer is actually 'serving' the files to theirs.

Load Balancing Web Server - getting techie here.

The internet contains millions of sites with hundreds of millions of computers connected to it. Some popular sites have to communicate with a large number of users or client computers. One computer trying to communicate with all the client computers will take a large amount of time. This cluttering problem can be solved by load balancing. Load balancing is a technique by which the load balancing web server distributes loads to other computers and processors to reduce computing time and obtain faster webpage loading.

Laptops.

Laptops are portable computers called laptops because they are usually used with the computer placed on the lap of the user. Laptops weigh between 3 to 4 kgs and run on batteries. The falling price levels have popularized laptops to a great extent. The present day laptops are light, have exceptional computing power, are affordable, and have sleek aesthetic appeal. They are used in various applications like programming large machines like CNC machines, Co-ordinate measuring machines etc. As laptops are transported a lot, a water resistant model is very much desirable. Panasonic has launched a waterproof laptop model available in Japan. Though not completely waterproof, it is resistant to coffee or water spills. There are commercial laptop variants available like the Dell latitude which is very popular. The latitude has Intel dual core processors, weighs 4.7 pounds, has 2MB L2 cache, has wide aspect screens of 12, 14 and 15 inches and larger, 512 MB RAM and 4 USB ports. More ram the merrier I say!

Tablet PCs.

Tablet PCs are light weight slate shaped hand-held computers. A tablet PC consists of a hand held touch screen with a light pen or stylus. Tablet PCs usually have inbuilt handwriting recognition software to recognize whatever is written on the screen with the stylus. In tablet PCs a keyboard is not required as data input can be done by touch or writing with the stylus. These are quite pricy but good for face to face business presentations.

Summary.

Computers have impacted our society in an enormous way. Computers are used in thousands of applications worldwide and are moving into new fields everyday. I hope this article has shed some light on an often misunderstood topic since computers really are quite simple.