Week 5: Muddy

The computer, one of the most important things to have in today's world. Computers do everything and it is really important everyone has one, depending on the financial situation. One of the reasons why I found this weeks lesson muddy was because there was so much that was covered. It was a lot of information to understand, especially for someone who doesn't go into the very deep of computers. One of the hardest sections for me were the processor. Pipelining was fairly difficult to understand, maybe because I've never heard that in the computer world. It was also hard for me to understand RSI. Again I think it was because there was too much information to grasp.

I found a few websites where they had video tutorials on how everything computer related works. They went in depth and the videos were not that long. And at the end of each video tutorial they had a mini quiz. They didn't have small points on hardware or input/output storage. They went into details. I understood the websites lectures better because I learn with more words written on a power point. The class lectures were mostly the instructor talking.

Our PC is a system, consisting of many components. Some of those components, like Windows XP, and all your other programs, are software. The stuff you can actually see and touch, and would likely break if you threw it out a fifth-story window, is hardware. The system unit is the actual computer; everything else is called a peripheral device. Your computer's system unit probably has at least one floppy disk drive, and one CD or DVD drive, into which you can insert floppy disks and CDs. There's another disk drive, called the hard disk inside the system unit. The floppy drive and CD drive are often referred to as drives with removable media or removable drives for short, because you can remove whatever disk is currently in the drive, and replace it with another. Your computer's hard disk can store as much information as tens of thousands of floppy disks, so don't worry about running out of space on your hard disk any time soon.

There's too much "stuff" on your computer's hard disk to use it all at the same time. During the average session sitting at the computer, you'll probably use only a small amount of all that's available. The stuff you're working with at any given moment is stored in random access memory (often abbreviated RAM, and often called simply "memory"). The advantage using RAM to store whatever you're working on at the moment is that RAM is very fast. Much faster than any disk. For you, "fast" translates to less time waiting and more time being productive. All of the information that's "in your computer", so to speak, is stored on your computer's hard disk. You never see that actual hard disk because it's sealed inside a special housing and needs to stay that way. Unlike RAM, which is volatile, the hard disk can hold information forever -- with or without electricity. Most modern hard disks have tens of billions of bytes of storage space on them. Which, in English, means that you can create, save, and download files for months or years without using up all the storage space it provides.

http://www.coolnerds.com/Newbies/Hardware/hardware.htm
http://www.pccomputernotes.com/