Floppy Disk Drive example essay topic

Motherboards The motherboard is heart of the computer, with all of it's connections leading out from itself and into every device in the machine. A variety of books that where looked at for reference have all agreed on one fact about the motherboard, and that is the fact that it is the main printed circuit board inside the machine in question, when you open a PC that much is obvious as the Motherboard will more than likely cover the whole of one side of the PC. According to Shelley O'Hara (Author of The Complete Idiots Guide to Buying and Upgrading PC's) the motherboard is 'a big, flat circuit board that covers the entire floor of the PC casing. ' The Motherboard is a very important part of the system since everything has to be connected to it, everything therefore has to be compatible with it. Also the speed of the connections that run from each component to the motherboard can have a positive or negative effect on the system in question. Ian Sinclair (Author of Build and Upgrade Your Own PC) says ' The motherboard design fixes the maximum speed of CPU that you can use.

' I will explain what this means in the section dedicated to the CPU. CPU At times the CPU is referred to as the 'brain' of the computer and this is not without justification. CPU stands for Central Processing Unit and it is argued amongst many people weather or not this is the most important part of the computer, therefore the one you should dedicate the lions share of your budget to. Regardless of whether or not it is the most important part of the PC it is still one of the most significant pieces of hardware inside the case. According to Joe Kraynak (Author of Using and Upgrading PC's) 'You can apply your savings on the processor to more memory or a faster hard drive. ' Basically speaking that means if you buy a slightly slower processor then you can make the rest of the system better, my personal opinion would probably be to agree with this statement, however he goes on to add 'Because most hardware manufacturers and software developers design their products for Intel processors, sticking with a Pentium processor minimises compatibility issues.

' Intel Pentium Processors are commonly the most expensive CPU's. The CPU is, like the Motherboard, a very important part of any computer system because the computer will not move faster than what the speed of the processor, however that is not to say that by merely buying a new CPU you will be speeding up the computer, this is a common mistake made by users who don't see the computer as a 'whole' and rather look at it as its different components. The CPU works in direct harmony (in theory) with all other parts of the system, one last thing I have to add about the CPU is this, if the motherboard has a slow BUS speed then the impact of a new processor will be greatly reduced. Memory The Memory of the computer comes under two sections, the RAM and the ROM.

RAM stands for Random Access Memory and ROM stands for Read Only Memory. The difference between the two is that, RAM is volatile and ROM is not. Volatile, when referred to in this way, means that when the workstation powers down or switches off then the contents of the memory is cleared. As I write this guide it is being stored in the RAM, if I where to turn off the computer without saving then the RAM would be cleared and it would be very hard to recover the document. The ROM is also known as the BIOS (Basic Input Output Services) and this holds certain coding that controls certain things about the computer system. Shelley O'Hara has this to say about memory 'If the processor is the the most important factor in how a PC performs, memory is a close second-place.

' This statement goes hand in hand with what was said in the CPU section of this guide, that a fast CPU is almost useless without the rest of the system being equally as powerful. ROM may in most cases be referred to as the BIOS however that's not strictly true, Shelley O'Hara mentions this in her section on memory. Memory as in RAM is very important to the computer, especially if this particular computer is going to be working with a lot of large files and programs, it would be a disaster if you were not able to open all of the applications that you need because of the lack of memory. However on the other hand ROM is not very important, all that you should really need to make sure about the ROM is that the BIOS version written onto it is the most recent (or a fairly recent) version. O / I Ports O / I Ports means Output / Input Ports. This covers all of the sockets, commonly at the back of the PC.

The intention of these ports are that you will use them to plug in external hardware such as a printer or a mouse into your PC. They are essential for all PC's because without them the user would be unable to interface with the PC. They work, for the most part, by being connected into the motherboard. Most of these are nowadays automatically detected as soon as we plug them into the slot therefore making it easy to just plug in say a mouse or a printer and be able to use it right away. They are very important towards the performance of the system, after all what good is a computer if you can't do anything with it? Having a computer with no mouse and keyboard would be like a horse with no legs, it's near enough useless.

Not all things that go in these ports are that important, for example you don't need a printer to be able to word process but it is extremely handy to be able to just plug in a device and use it from the go. Hard Disk This is the main storage device on all PC's. It is capable, now, of holding huge programs and file sizes. When it comes to the Hard Disk the bigger the better. It accomplishes this task by storing data onto a magnetic disk by magnetising each section. Inside the Hard Disk there is a read / write head and this is what, as its name suggests, does all of the reading and writing from the disk.

This read / write head magnetisers something known as sectors on the Hard Disk, if a sector fills up then the read / write head will move onto another sector, no matter where on the disk and continue writing. The Hard Disk has a special area on it known as the FAT or File Allocation Table, which tells the read / write head where all the pieces of information it needs are. However if a read / write head has to keep moving around the disk to get the information it needs rather than it all being in the one place, then it will slow things down a touch. To counter this programs like Disk Defrag mentors are used to put all of the data together and therefore improve access times on the Hard Disk. You will more than likely have to install all programs to the Hard Disk for quick access to them, it is not often nowadays to find a program that will run from a floppy disk.

A Hard Disk can be very important if you plan to store an awful lot on your PC or have large programs you wish to use. However the speed and size are in direct proportion to the tasks you will be performing, Joe Kraynak says 'If you " re using the drive to make unattended backups, speed is irrelevant. ' Floppy Disk Drive A floppy Disk drive is a suitable method of storing data, provided that the data is very small. It can normally only hold a few pictures and / or a few documents. In today's high specification world of computing one would assume that this sort of storage is unacceptable.

However it can still be useful for home storage and the like. It works by magnetising the data onto the disk on the inside, this disk is coated with a special magnetic material which allows the magnetization to take place. Unfortunately, because of this data stored on floppy disks can be lost of corrupt in areas of magnetic interference. When a computer reads from a Floppy Disk it uses a magnetic head that reads the data from the disk as the dick spins. According to Ian Sinclair ' When the drive is used, the drive motor starts to spin the disk at a speed of about 300 revolutions per minute. ' In comparison to your hard disk, this is not very fast at all, the reason for this being that the magnetic head of the floppy has to be held further away from the disk than a hard disk read / write head because it could scratch the surface of the floppy disk.

A floppy disk can be useful for backing up single copies of a certain file or two but it is not recommended, nor is it practical to use it for much more as file sizes keep growing the floppy disk will continue to become more and more obsolete. This statement goes with what Joe Kraynak says: 'With the increased popularity of the Internet and email, people are relying less and less on floppy disks to exchange files. ' CD-ROM / DVD-ROM Drive The CD-ROM and the DVD-ROM drives are very popular methods of data storage. It is essential for almost all computers nowadays to have access to a CD-ROM drive in the very least, especially at a business level. They work in a very similar way to the hard disk and floppy disk drives in the sense that they are read and written to, however this job is done with a laser and the term for writing to a CD or DVD is often referred to as 'burning'. DVD-ROM's work in exactly the same way, the only difference being that DVD-ROM's contain a lot more data.

A CD-ROM is almost essential according to Ian Sinclair 'If you want to make use of multimedia programs, in which text, sound and graphics are all used. ' A DVD-ROM I would say would only be functional in a system if you wished to either playback a DVD multimedia sequence of if the company had an enormous amount of data to back up that would exceed 650 MB or so. Expansion Cards Expansion cards are the cards inside of the PC that, plainly speaking give it new features. Things like internal modems and graphics cards fall under the title of Expansion Cards. Expansion cards are useful for performing specific features for a computer, the modem takes care of speaking to an analogue line for the computer and acts as a translator for the computer and the phone line. A graphics card allows you to deal with high quality media the likes of which you would have previously either had trouble with or had it not work at all.

Expansion cards are paramount for fine-tuning the system. They are the parts of the machine that make it truly customisable, an expert may even be able to take the specifications of your expansion cards and make an estimated guess at what the system is mostly used for! That is of course depending on whether or not the person whom specified the machines fine tuned them as well as they should have. Power Supply The power supply, as the name suggests supply's power to the whole system. This is the part of the computer that is hooked directly into the mains. One quick fact about power supplies is that, due to the capacitors and other electronics inside of them they are normally very dangerous even when disconnected from the mains, they are almost completely non user-serviceable and quite a lot of suppliers would probably recommend that you buy a new power supply should it become faulty.

The power supply has the job of taking the AC power from the wall socket and converting it into DC power. This is because AC current is liable to damage the delicate innards of the PC according to the notes supplied 'It outputs 12 volts to run disk drive motors and 5 or 3.3 volts to run the digital circuits'. A power supply since it powers everything in the PC is another essential part. The only thing you will be likely to get different on a power supply is the amount of wattage out and the amount of connectors that it will allow out. Book: Build and Upgrade your own PC. Written by Ian Sinclair.

Published in 1999 by Newness in Great Britton by Biddle's, Guildford, Surrey. Book: The Complete Idiots Guide to Buying & Upgrading PC's. Written by Shelley O'Hara. Published in 1995 by Alpha Books in the United States of America. Book: Using and Upgrading PC's. Written by Joe Kraynak.

Published in 1998 by Que Corporation in the United States of America.