© 2009 Jessica Hall
A Little About Me
I
am currently
enrolled in the Risk
Management and
General Insurance
Program at BCIT. I will
finish my first term
December 11th 2009 and
will be available to work
full time until January 3rd
2010.
Programs I Will
Have Completed
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Microeconomics,
Organizational
Behaviour,
Financial Math,
Accounting,
Marketing,
Business
Communications
Business
Information
Systems.
Some people love to take
things apart to see how
they work. But just
because you can take a
gadget apart doesn't mean
you can put it back
together again. Even a
successful rebuild doesn't
guarantee the device will
still work. It's best to leave
some deconstruction
projects to the
professionals. When the
device in question is a
computer, this warning is
particularly important.
C
omputers can be
complicated,
delicate and even
dangerous. But that
doesn't stop us from
wanting to know what's
actually inside one. That's
why we here at How Stuff
Works have taken it upon
ourselves to dismantle a
perfectly innocent
computer in the name of
science. We chose an IBM
-laptop computer, which
not only has all the
standard components
you'd find in most
computers, but also
arranges them together
into a very compact
configuration.
Cost of Computer
Parts
CPU
Video
Card
RAM
Keep in mind that while
desktop computers are
larger than
laptops, the
actual
components inside the
computers are pretty
much the same. The parts
might look a bit different -there's no need to pack
them in so tightly -- but
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© 2009 Jessica Hall
Cost
Speed
Capacity
Efficiency
they fulfill the same
functions as the parts in a
laptop computer. One
other big difference is that
many desktop computers
allow users to swap out
cards and components
through computer card
slots while many laptop
computers have integrated
cards that users can't swap
out.
We've divided up the
components into two main
categories: the brains and
the guts. The brains of the
computer include all the
elements that allow the
computer to process data.
The guts include all the
other elements that make
computers useful, but
aren't directly involved in
computing information.
The base of
operations for
the brains of a
computer is the
motherboard. The
motherboard serves as a
literal foundation for many
of the other elements
inside your computer. It's a
large printed circuit board.
The motherboard provides
the connections and
sockets that let other
components communicate
with each other.
Motherboards come in
different shapes and sizes - a motherboard in a
laptop computer might not
look like one from a
desktop PC.
T
he computer brain
is a microprocessor
called the central
processing unit (CPU). The
CPU is a chip containing
millions of tiny transistors.
It's the CPU's job to
perform the calculations
necessary to make the
computer work the
transistors in the CPU
manipulate the data. You
can think of a CPU as the
decision maker.
A
nother critical
component in
computers is
memory. The two most
important kinds of
memory are read-only
memory (ROM) and
random access memory
(RAM). Computers can
read data stored in ROM,
but can't write new data to
it. With RAM, computers
can read from and write to
that memory. Without
computer memory, every
calculation on a computer
would be stateless. That
means there'd be no way
to preserve information
from one moment to the
next and every process
would start on a clean
slate. That's not useful if
you want to create
complex programs.
M
any desktop
PCs have the
capacity for
additional RAM. The user
simply has to open the
computer and plug RAM
chips into the appropriate
sockets on the
motherboard.
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