OK, this may seem simple, but in the day of tablets, laptops, convertibles, and all-in-ones, some people have difficulty understanding what makes up an actual computer. And when they go shopping for one the options and specifications are overwhelming. I'll cover what to look for in the specifications in a separate post, but the first step is to understand the parts...
Every computer, at it's heart, has what's known as a processor. It is the one big fancy computer "chip" that handles all of the actual processing of information. You've probably seen "Intel Inside" or "AMD" stickers. Intel and AMD are the two big players in the computer processor market. They're not the only ones, but they're pretty much the only ones that you'll see on a standard PC or laptop. These processors do so much work that in desktop PCs they have fans attached to them to keep them cool. If you've ever set a laptop on your lap you've probably felt the heat of the processor.
- Computer Processor
The processor is connected to a big circuit board that is most often called the motherboard. The mother board is the circuit board that connects all of the components that make up the computer. It is basically the central hub to which all other parts of the computer connect. In a desktop computer the motherboard sits in the big box, in a laptop it usually fills up most of the space inside the laptops case below the keyboard. Beyond controlling the flow of electricity and data through all the various parts of the computer the motherboard also performs some of the higher level functionality that I'll talk about later. In other cases the higher level functionality is provided by cards attached to the motherboard.
- Motherboard
Directly attached to the motherboard is what's known as RAM...Random Access Memory, or just Memory Typically RAM comes in the form of a row of computer chips on a circuit board that is plugged into a slot on the motherboard. RAM is where the computer keeps the data and programs that are currently being used by the processor. Think about it like a scratchpad you keep on your desk with notes on what you're currently working on. It wouldn't make sense to put them in a filing cabinet and have to go get them every time you need to look something up. It also wouldn't make sense to put the entire contents of your filing cabinet on your desktop because you couldn't find what you needed.
- RAM Modules
Attached to the motherboard using a cable is the hard drive. The hard drive is basically the filing cabinet of the computer. While the filing cabinet can store significantly more information than the scratchpad on the desk, it takes longer to get to that information. Hard drives are typically what's known as magnetic media. Just like an old fashioned cassette tape player or VHS tape the information is stored using magnetic fields. In the case of a hard drive, however, the data is on a round glass plate coated with a magnetic surface. An arm inside the hard drive can then reach anyplace it needs to to access the data (unlike a cassette that has to be accessed in order). While a computer can do this amazingly fast, it is still way slower than getting the data from the RAM. You may ask, why not just make all of the memory RAM then the computer can access it all very quickly? There's two reasons, one technical which you really really don't need to know. The other is cost. Storing a large volume of information on computer chips is far more expensive than storing that same amount of data on magnetic media. This is slowly changing though. Some recent computers (mostly laptops) use what are referred to as Solid State Hard Drives. SSHD's are basically a replacement for magnetic hard drives. At this time solid state hard drives tend to be small. The big ones being about 128 - 256 GB while the average magnetic drive these days is 4-6 times larger.
- Magnetic Hard Drive
The final thing I'll discuss today is the power supply. The power supply is pretty self explanitory. It's the part that takes AC power from the wall, converts it to DC power and supplies that power to all of the components of the computer. In the case of a laptop it's a little different. The power supply is the "brick" that plugs into the wall. The brick converts AC to DC and then it is fed into the computer as DC, and it also charges the battery. On desktop computers power supplies are a common point of failure. Fortunately they are a cheap and very easy fix.
- Power Supply
In the next post I'll talk about the parts of the computer that let us interact with it....the network card, bluetooth, video card, sound card, input devices, monitors, and more. As always don't hesitate to ask any questions or make any comments.
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