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Guide to the inside of your pc

Posted by sporg

For our first guide I thought it would be fun to have a look at what parts make up that white or grey box that sits on your desk. But first a little history, the first device to be invented that could be considered a far distant relative to the box we have on our desks today was the calculating clock invented by a German professor Wilhelm Schickard in 1623. Although this looks nothing like our computers today this device and ones like it are responsible for sending us down the road that brought us our computers today.

The first computer that looks anything like our current workstations was invented in 1981 when IBM decided to standardise the PC and use Intel’s new microprocessor. The personal computer was born and you no longer needed a room the size of a house to use a pc. Not much has changed in the makeup of the computers since IBM made the personal pc. Yes, our computers are a lot faster and have colour and sound but the building blocks that make up our pc’s are much the same. Let’s have a look at the main parts that are put together to make your working computer.

Motherboard

This part is the heart of any computer system. Your motherboard is the first building block to having a working computer. This is because everything else that is installed will plug into the motherboard. As you can imagine the motherboard is one of the most important parts of the modern personal computer. Whenever you plan to build a computer it is necessary to buy the correct motherboard for the processor and memory that you are going to use.

Today’s motherboards are also packed with a lot of other secondary devices like built in network cards, USB ports, Printer Ports, Video Cards and many more. These secondary devices are normally separate cards that would need to be plugged into the motherboard.

Processor

Or microprocessor is the brains of the computer. It is plugged into the motherboard with a lot of little pins that allow it to receive data and instructions and to send out the results of the calculations. There are two main manufacturers on the market at the moment. Intel who first invented the processor and AMD who have always provided processors that are great value for money.

Memory

Memory or RAM can be considered to be the computers short term memory. Unfortunately unlike us, when a computer is turned off everything in the RAM is forgotten. The reason RAM is used in a computer is because of its speed. If we did not have RAM it would take minutes to open a document and not seconds. It would also take a good 5 minutes to start your favourite game and then it would be unplayable. So RAM is a necessary evil. When you start your computer the operating system has to load itself into RAM then when you open a document the operating system then loads this into RAM. When finished you need to shutdown the computer so that it can save the information it has in RAM to your hard disk. When purchasing RAM there are quite a few types as well as a range of different speeds.

Hard Disk

This is the computers long term memory. It is far slower than RAM but when the power is turned off it will still remember the information. Hard disks have grown is size while dropping in price for the last few years so it is not unusual for computers to have a lot more space for your games, pictures, mp3’s and documents than you would ever need. There are also 3 different types of hard disks; you have IDE, SATA and SCSI. SCSI is normally used in servers and has the ability to do multiple things at once. IDE is an older interface that is still in use in some computers. SATA is the new type of hard disks that are now used in computers you buy today. It also provides some of the advantages of the SCSI hard disks but at a lower cost.

Power Supply

This part provides all the power that is needed by the other parts in the computer. There has been little change to the design of the power supply except a decrease in size and new connection types. Every power supply is rated by how much power it can produce. This is measured in watts. Computers with 3d graphics cards or lots of internal cards would require a larger power supply.

Video Card

The video card allows the computer to display text or graphics on the computer monitor. These days you can buy a motherboard with a basic graphics card built in. If you are planning to run 3d applications then the built in graphics card won’t do. So you can buy motherboards that support connections like AGP or PCI Express. These connections allow 3d graphic cards to plug into the motherboard.

Other Parts

After the few main parts listed above you have a wide range of parts that could be used in your computer. Some options are sounds cards, USB cards, TV cards just to name a few of the options.

This is only a general overview of the makeup of a computer and as you can see there are a lot of options available when putting computers together. In following posts we will look a bit closer at some of these parts.

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