Learnings of the Week

I learned about:

FUNDAMENTAL ELEMENTS OF A COMPUTER

1. System unit- acts like the center or core, processing the data and information it receives from input devices.Output devices like printers receive the system unit’s processed informations.

• •The system case is a plastic and metal box that houses components such as the motherboard, disk drives and power supply unit.
• •There are two basic types of system case: desktop and tower. Desktop case: is designed to sit horizontally on a surface, so that it is wider than it is long. These are usually used for

  • office or home PCs. 2 basic sizes: standard and slimline. Tower case: is designed to sit vertically on a surface, so that it is higher than it is wide. 3 basic sizes: full, midi and mini.
• Parts of the case

  •Cover: the case has a cover which is removed by either undoing the screws at the back, or pressing together clips that release it.

  •Front Panel: provides access to the floppy and CD, a power on/off switch, a reset switch, and LEDs (light Emitting Diodes) to indicate drive operation.Rear panel: has slots through which interface card connectors appear. these slots should either be covered by an interface card or a metal strip known as a blanking plate.
• The motherboard is the largest board of the computer system. It contains the CPU, BIOS,

  • memory, mass storage interfaces, serial and all the controllers required to control standard peripheral devices, such as the display screen, keyboard, and disk drive.
• The mother board battery: is used to preserve the computer’s clock’s time and your BIOS settings while the computer is turned off.
• CPU ( CENTRAL PROCESSING UNIT) -is the device that interprets and executes instructions.It has the ability to fetch, decode, and execute instructions and transfer information to and from other resources over the computer’s main data-transfer path, the bus.
• •The system clock synchronizes the operation of all parts of the PC.
• Main memory-Holds the programs and data that the processor is actively working with.
• Secondary memory-The contents are easily changed, but this is very slow compared to main memory.
• •Zip, the most popular super-capacity floppy disks is the Zip disk.
• Hard disk-Might have a storage capacity of 40 gigabytes. This is about 300 times the amount of storage in main memory (assuming 128 megabytes of main memory).
• •The standard CD-ROM disks has a diameter of 12 centimeters and holds 650 megabytes.
• •CD-rewritable drive, which can write onto a blank CD-RW disk and then edit what you wrote.
• •1997, the electronic industry selling an improved kind of CD, called a Digital Versatile Disk (DVD)
• •Graphics Accelerator: adapters graphics coprocessor for performing graphics calculations.
• •Video Card are also called video adapter, video board , video display board, graphics card and graphics.
• •The video/graphics card converts digital data into signals that can be sent across a connector to you monitor, which interprets the signal into an image on screen.

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