So ... The box that your keyboard is connected to, what’s in it?

The following video created by howstuffworks.com gives you a visual tour of the items covered below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The main physical components of a PC are known as hardware. The hardware inside an average PC are:

Power Supply

As you would expect, this is the component that takes the mains electricity input and distributes power to other components inside your computer. There will be a feed to your motherboard, another to your CD/DVD drive, another to your Hard Drive and so on. The output rating of your power supply will determine how many and what type of internal components you can attach.

Motherboard

This is the main printed circuit board inside the case. It is the part of the computer that just about all other parts are connected to. It has a set of microchips for itself, and also provides sockets and connections for other parts of the system. Think of it as the nerve system in your body which carries information to your brain and controls the flow of information to other parts or your body such as your hands and feet.

CPU (Central Processing Unit)

In Human body terms, this is the brain. This is where all the calculations happen. The CPU itself is actually pretty small, about half the size of a credit card. It can get very hot whilst doing it’s job. This is why it will have a radiator (heat sink) and a cooling fan attached to it. You may have heard of processors with more than one core. More on this in the hardware section.

Memory (RAM)

RAM (random access memory) is where all the running processes in your computer actually happen. Not to be confused with a hard drive, Memory or RAM is only able to retain information whilst the computer is turned on. The memory chips allow any part of the memory to be written to or read from in any order. As this is where the actual work happens, more memory is better (although operating systems have upper limits to the amount of memory that they can address)

Sound Card

On your computer, this may be built into the motherboard. If not, then this is an ‘expansion’ card. Which means it lives in one of the expansion slots on your motherboard. The sound cards job is to process digital information from your computer and output a signal that can be heard using speakers. It can also listen to the output from a microphone or external device and convert that signal to digital for storage and/or further processing by other programs.

Video Card

This may be built into the motherboard. If not, then this is an ‘expansion’ card. Which means it lives in one of the expansion slots on your motherboard. The role of the video card is to generate and output images to your display (monitor). For basic tasks such as browsing the Internet or writing a letter, a low end or built in video solution is fine. Computer games however will require a medium to high end ‘expansion card’ solution.

Hard Drive

This is where all of the information is stored in a non-volatile state. This means that the information is retained when the computer is turned off (unlike memory) The Hard Drive stores the computers operating system, your programs such as email client and web browser. Your system drivers (instructions) for your other connected and built in devices such as video cards and cameras. And user generated content such as your emails, letters, spreadsheets etc.

CD/DVD Drive

This device can read from ‘optical media’ such as CD’s and DVD’s. I reads the surface of the disks using a laser and passes the information to the computers memory ready for processing. Most modern drives can also write to optical media effectively performing the same operation in reverse. Information read from the hard drive into memory, is burned into the disk also using a laser.

 

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