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Hardware

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7 views3 pages

Hardware

Uploaded by

sethii_ankush
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Hardware

Computer
A computer is a device that accepts data in a digital format and manipulate it to give an
output.

Primary and Secondary storage device


A computer system uses two modes of data storage, primary and secondary.
Primary consists of integrated circuit chips that use electricity to store information. It is termed as
Random Access Memory (RAM).
Secondary storage is used to store information even when the system is powered off. These
devices use magnetic and optical storage technologies to store data permanently. Hard disks &
CD ROMS are examples of secondary storage devices.

Hard disk
Hard disk is a secondary storage device used to store large volumes of data. It consists of one or more
platters coated with a magnetic substance & a read/write head per platter.

Bios (basic input/output system)


It is a permanent memory that is programmed with the basic instructions required for the PC to start and
run.

CMOS (Complementary metal oxide semiconductor)


It is user programmed memory chip used to store the system configuration, such as time and date.

Bus
Bus refers to the data path on a circuit board that has multiple devices connected to it. The bus on
The motherboard is known as Front Side Bus (FSB).

Compute Memory: ROM and RAM


Computer memory is the internal storage area in the computer.
There are two types of memory: ROM and RAM

ROM- ROM is short for Read Only memory, whose contents can be read but not changed. The simple
example of ROM is the memory from which the computer boots.

RAM- Random Access memory, it is the actual memory that can be used to process data.
There are two types of RAMs :
RDRAM and SDRAM
RDRAM-
RDRAM stands for Rambus Dynamic Random Access Memory developed by Rambus corporation, it is
memory subsystem consisting of the RAM, the RAM controller & the bus connecting the RAM to processor
and other devices. The RDRAM is based on 16 bit bus.

SDRAM-
Synchronous DRAM operates in synchronization with the clock speed of CPU. This tends to increase the
no. of instructions performed by processor in a given time.

DDR SDRAM-
DDR stands for double data rate. DDR SDRAM uses both the rising and falling edges of the system clock to
transfer data rather that just the rising edge as a normal SDRAM does. It is similar to SDRAM but uses
twice the bandwidth, therefore brings a boost in performance.

Cache Memory
It refers to the Random Access memory used by the processor to speed up the execution of instructions.
Chipset
It’s a combination of microchips that control our computer’s function and provide all the basic features
on motherboard.

POST (Power On Self Test)


When we turn a computer’s power ON, the bios runs a series of diagnostic tests called Power On Self
Test. (POST).

Motherboard
It is a main circuit board of a computer system on which components such as CPU, RAM and add on
cards are placed.

Control panel and Device manager


Control Panel is the central location for system configuration changes.

Device Manager is an OS feature that lets to view and change the properties of all devices
attached to your computer

Input/output device
A hardware device that accepts inputted information and also has the capability of outputting
that information. Good examples of input/output devices are a floppy diskette drive and a hard
disk drive.

Sound card
A sound card is a printed circuit board that plugs into computer’s motherboard usually in PCI
slot. It’s used to generate input/output sound from the computer.

Video card
The component of a computer responsible for producing the visuals on the monitor is referred
to as video card.

USB
Universal Serial bus, it facilitates adding new devices without installing additional hardware
such as add on adapter cards.

Firmware
Firmware is the basic, permanent software that certain hardware that certain hardware
requires in order to function properly. This software is stored in Read only memory (ROM) and
cannot be deleted or modified by a user.

Defragment
Defragmentation finds all the file fragments and arranges them together in one location,
increases the reading speed.

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