I would like to help you in getting to know the basics of your PC and maybe I can clear up a few mysteries.  Hopefully these pages will help you to understand your PC better than you did before you came here.

Understanding the basic components of a PC.

The Monitor: 

New PC's all now come with an LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) FST (Flat Screen Technology) monitor, they are better than the old CRT ( Cathode Ray Tube) equivalents as they don't flicker and give you a head ache after hours of use. There are 100's if not 1000's fewer working parts to go wrong, they are lightweight and easy to move around. They have a terrific range of on-screen colours, contrast and brightness settings and don't take up much space on your table. You could even hang one on your wall like a picture although it might be a bit too far away for normal viewing which is about 2 to 3 feet. It is important to set the monitor at the right height and eye level so as to reduce or eliminate strain on your neck and eyes, if after a few hours of viewing your monitor you get neck ache then you need to re adjust the monitor as this is a tell tale sign it is not set right.

LCD monitors are more economical than the CRT and use about 35W of electricity compared to a CRT that uses about 110W, that's a 70% saving.

There is also Windows power saving options accessed. right click on the desktop - properties - screensaver - power and there you can set stuff that puts the monitor on standby.

On the subject of screen-savers, these are programs that run to stop your screen from being burnt from a repetitive displayed image.  For example if your monitor was to display a white grid all day every day this image would remain as a ghost image on your monitor screen when the monitor is switched off as it would have "burned" onto it.  The way to stop this is to have a screen saver set to run every 10 minutes or so.

Screen resolution is how many dots or pixels can be shown on the screen.  The pixels give the colour to your screen, they are very close together and you need a magnifying glass to see them. They are set out at 800x600 -1024x768 -1280x1024 and even higher depending on your monitor make and display adapter or graphics card power. The higher the resolution the more powerful your display adaptor needs to be.

Monitors come in a variety of different screen sizes, the most common are 15" - 17" - 19" and 20".  Mine is a 19" run at a resolution of 1024X768 if I make the resolution any higher then the text on screen is smaller and harder to read so 1024x768 is ideal for me.

Some LCD monitors have glossy screens and these improve the image quality slightly however they reflect a lot of light and I find a matt screen is better as I cant see reflection in it, this is one of the things that always annoyed me with the CRT monitor and now this problem has been solved.

LCD screens can be damaged easier than the CRT ones and you have to take care not to touch the screen with any pressure as you can easily damage the LCD mixture that makes up the images. A screen protector can be used and you can get them from PC stores. if you clean the screen use a soft damp cloth with a bit of soapy water, never use strong chemicals.

The CPU or Micro-Processor:

The CPU (Central Processing Unit) is the brain in your PC, it literally processes all the information that you put into your PC and also runs all of the applications and hardware in your PC. Applications are programs that are needed to do something, like a game, a spreadsheet, play music, create images, word processing they are all applications. The CPU handles the running of them. Hardware are things like the Monitor, the Hard Drive the CD player, Keyboard, Mouse etc. Software are all the applications. The CPU runs them all.  The CPU's capabilities to process information and applications is base on its speed. The speed is measured in electrical units of hertz a modern CPU runs at about 3GigaHertz (Ghz) or 3000 million cycles of activity every second.

CPU's cannot deal with numbers as we know them i.e. 1234567890 as these digits are meaningless when represented by electrical inputs, instead a CPU uses the binary switch system of  1="ON" or 0="OFF". A single "on" is counted as one "bit" and eight of them that make up a single character is called a "byte" For example the letter 'X' is represented as 01011000 or an electrical cycle of "on-off-on-off-off-on-on-on" each letter is 8 bits long or 8 on's and off's which is 1 byte.  CPU's are very powerful today and can handle binary numbers 64 bits long or 0101101010100110101010101001010011010010100 0101010101 and 8 rows of them every second.

The Hard Drive:

The Hard Drive (HDD) is where the PC keeps all of the applications as they have to be stored somewhere and it's the HDD that stores them. The HDD is similar in function to a music CD or DVD  in that information is kept on it to be retrieved later. You install or 'put in' stuff onto the HDD before your CPU can use it. i.e.  installing information off a CD.  HDD's vary in storage capacity, they are measured in how many pieces of information it can store. This is measured in bytes. Three thousand bytes or 3Kb  for example may be all of the text on this page. 10Kb is 10,000 times this amount, 100Kb is 100,000 times this amount and 1Mb is 1 million times this amount.  Today's HDDs store in the Gb or Gigabyte range. 1Gb is 1000 million bytes, and today's 300Gb HDD's are therefore quite big storage facilities

The Drives:

Drives are similar to the Hard Drives in a PC except that you have more control over them and use them directly to install applications or to copy applications over to them. Drives can consist of a CD ROM, a DVD, a 3½inch floppy disc (now obsolete) a USB flash drive or an externally plugged in Hard Drive to name the most common. Anyone of these drives will allow applications to be installed into a PC with easy and simplicity.

The Memory:

Every PC needs to remember what it has to do, what its doing or what its already done. It has to remember what to do when you run an application on your PC. If its memory bank is small then it will take a long time to run the application as it cannot recall information quick enough. Memory storage capacity is also measured in bytes and the bigger the amount of bytes it can remember the faster it can do its tasks. Memory in a PC now is about 1Gb and this is ample to run most of today's high powered applications. Although my machine has 2Gb. Memory as you can never have too much.  Memory also has an electrical operating speed measured in Hertz (Htz), again the faster the better about 533MHz Bus Clock Rate is used today.  DDR2 SODIMM MEMORY-@ 1GB PC2-4300 is about $58.00 and this is super fast memory.

Memory is installed in the PC as little cards commonly called chips or RAM (Read Access Memory) chips. Memory has applications sent to it by the CPU or we can say "its written to"  RAM basically means that once a PC is switched off then all the information it has remembered is lost. ROM (Read Only Memory) chips store all the basic applications a PC needs to operate, like how to load and set the operating System every time a PC is switched on.  Incidentally, all Calculators use ROM chips.  The ROM chips never lose their memory but cannot be written to like RAM chips can, so they would be of no use to a PC user which is why we use RAM instead as it can be written to.

The Main-Board:

ROM chips are built into the main electrical circuit board that is also called a Main-Board.  This board is where all the components of a PC are connected, these include but are not limited to the BIOS chip, HDD, CPU, Memory, Graphics and Sound card, Power supply and all the cables that connect everything all plug into the main-board directly.  There are some sensitive micro electronics on there and that's why a PC should not be dropped or knocked.

The Keyboard and Mouse:

These are pretty easy to explain, they are the items used to input into the PC. With a keyboard you push keys whilst with a mouse you point and click. All of the operations of the mouse can be done with the keyboard, but a mouse can't type ! Below is a list of keyboard operations, generally for Windows XP but most will work on any Windows OS

The Operating System:

Everything you do on a  PC is run and managed by the Operating System (OS).  The Operating system on almost all PC's is Windows and most likely the one your reading this with, in variants as Windows 95, windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Millennium, Windows XP or the new Windows Vista.  Windows rules the roost although there are other operating systems like Linux and Apple Macintosh. Apple Mac needs its own dedicated Apple Mac PC to work on whilst Linux can run on a normal PC as long as its stored separately on the HDD to Windows.

BIOS:

This is the Basic Input & Output Settings of a PC.  They are accessed as the PC is powered up usually via the Alt and Del keys or the F8 key is pressed. A blue screen is then seen with a menu of settings that can be altered, these settings are normally set by the manufacturer for every PC and often they do not need to be messed with.

Adding more RAM will make booting up your PC faster, faster loading and running of all applications and overall better performance, you cant beat getting as much RAM as you can, and its quite cheap now too !

I will try to update this page in the near future.

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