Brief Computer Tutorial
The Hardware
This is not meant as an exhaustive tutorial, just a quick overview to explain some of the more arcane computer mumbo jumbo that you hear all the time. Some of the things that I say aren't true in the strictest sense, but true enough for the purposes here. For a more in depth explanation, go to Tom's Hardware & Performance Page.
Your computer's hardware is the stuff that takes up physical space. Generally, any given computer will have a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and a case (and probably a printer and all sorts of cables). However, I'll assume you know what they are and look like. Now for the more confusing stuff that sits inside the case.
* Motherboard: The motherboard is the big green board that everything plugs into. You could say it's the mother of all computer circuit boards. Its function is to complete the circuits between all the other various components of your computer and provides power and pathways for data to travel. Motherboards come with different design, I/O bus architectures, chipsets, and cache configuration. It might be tempting to save a few bucks by buying cheap motherboards, but it's not a good idea to skimp on something that connects everything together on your computer.
o BIOS: Basic Input Output System. The BIOS is a set of instructions that tells your CPU how to communicate with the chipset (see below). Different BIOS's exist for different chipsets because, well, the instructions need to be different for different chips. Some BIOS's are also better than other BIOS's. As with all programmed instructions, there always exists the possibility (probability) of bugs.
o Chipset: It's a group of chips that tell your computer how to communicate with and control everything that you plug into your computer. However, you should note that the chipset only contains enough instruction to communicate with the peripherals at a very rudimentary level. To get your computer to use whatever hardware you plug into it (e.g. printers, modems, mice, etc.), you need to load the proper software drivers (computer instructions specifically written for specific hardware). The chipset just provides a common way for the computer to talk to the hardware. Today, Intel has pretty much cornered the market with Triton Chipsets. For what it's worth, they're (usually) pretty damn good chipsets. If you buy something else just to save a couple of bucks, I believe the expression goes something like, "you're not the brightest light on the block, are you?"
o I/O bus architecture: Simply stated, the bus is how the data travels between various components in your computer.
+ Slot-1: It's Intel's proprietary design (read: Intel royalties on every motherboard sold with the slot-1 design) for the Pentium II CPU to motherboard interface. Its value was/is somewhat questionable, other than to further fatten Intel's bottom line. There's also talk of a Slot-2...
+ Socket-7: This is the common CPU to motherboard interface for Intel Pentium and Pentium MMX, AMD K6 and K6-2, Cyrix PR and Media GL, and IDT Winchips. Its popularity is probably due to the fact that Intel doesn't own the design. You can use any of the aforementioned CPUs in a socket-7 motherboard as long as the the motherboard's BIOS has support for it.
+ AGP: Advanced Graphics Port is a semi-recent addition to accommodate the need for transferring large texture bitmaps (read: playing games) from your system's main memory to the graphics accelerator's memory. While it looks great on paper, there's quite a bit of debate as to its usefulness in the real world.
+ PCI: Peripheral Component Interconnect is one of the newer and most dominant bus architectures. It allows more data to flow through your computer (wider bandwidth). The graphics intensive (high bandwidth) computer environment of today demands PCI. It's supposed to be the everlasting bus architecture of today and tomorrow. Keep in mind that the same computer gurus once thought using more than 640K of RAM was inconceivable. It supports a 64-bit data path and allows for Plug and Play (PnP). PnP is supposed to allow you to plug a card into your computer, turn it on, and have everything working fine and dandy without fiddling with any jumpers. However, the experience is more like Plug and Pray. It was much simpler just changing a few jumpers. Personally, I disable PnP and set the settings manually whenever possible.
+ VLB: VESA Local Bus was also developed because of the bandwidth problem. It was mostly a favorite of graphics adaptors because it supported a 32-bit data path and up to a 40 MHz clock. However, it was a quick fix for the time, and today's graphics have outgrown the VLB.
+ EISA: Enhanced Industry Standard Architecture is pretty much obsolete. It was designed to support the 32-bit data path and background transfers without the CPU, but was never met with much public acceptance.
+ ISA: Industry Standard Architecture is still widely used today. It is an old 16-bit bus architecture with very little bandwidth. Its main advantage is that it is cheap and is used for low bandwidth-demanding cards like your modem, sound, or game card. It's a good idea to have at least 3 or 4 ISA slots on your motherboard. Most adaptors are still ISA's.
o CPU (Central Processing Unit): The most obvious analogy is the brain. Although brains are autonomous and CPU's are more like autistic Charlie Babbots. Either way, the CPU handles and manipulates all of the data in your computer. CPU's are rated in MegaHertz. That's techobabble for how many times a second your computer performs a set of calculations. A CPU rated at 60 MHz clears its clock 60 million times a second. A CPU rated at 120 MHz clears its clock 120 million times a second, yielding a 200% improvement in speed over its 60 MHz cousin, and so on. CPU's have greatly improved in speed, while the other components have not. No matter how fast your CPU is, it can't perform any calculations if it doesn't have any data to manipulate. It might be wiser spending the money on more RAM or a faster hard drive. Strive for some balance in your life.
o Video/Graphics card: The best computer on earth isn't going to do you any good if you can't see the results of its amazing powers. The video card converts the digital signals inside your computer to analog signals that your monitor can display. Various graphics accelerator cards exist to speed up your graphics display. More memory is generally better, but different types of memory exist.
o I/O Controller Card: As the name suggests, the Input/Output controller card controls the data that moves in and out of your computer. Typically, the mouse or external modems are plugged into your I/O controller card. Today, the I/O controller is generally built into your motherboard.
o Memory:
+ Random Access Memory (RAM): This is one of the most important components of the computer that most people tend to ignore. The CPU only manipulates data. How fast your computer performs tasks depends on how fast data can be fed into your CPU. RAM is rated in nanoseconds (10^ -9), while your hard drive is rated in milliseconds (10^ -3). Once your computer is out of physical RAM, the data is read from your hard drive. The speed difference between how fast data is fed into your CPU is typically 70 nsec for RAM and 10 msec for your hard drive. That means as soon as you're out of RAM, your computer is about 140,000 times slower! Even if you've got the newest 200 MHz Pentium, the speed improvement over a 60 MHz Pentium is only 3.3 times. It doesn't take Einstein to figure out which is more important if you're really interested in speed and performance.
# SRAM: Static RAM. This is a very high quality of RAM that does not need to be refreshed (DRAM based chips need refreshing every few clock cycles, otherwise the charge fades). This is typically only used for caching data from the slower RAM due to the expense.
# DRAM: It's nothing fancy, just the regular Dynamic RAM that's in your computer, typically rated 60 or 70 ns. It's single-ported, which means only one port for accessing data-either writing or reading. Therefore, the reading and writing cannot be done at the same time, making it necessary for waiting to occur.
# EDO RAM: Extended Data Output RAM. This is basically the same thing as your DRAM, but generally 5-20% faster. Also single-ported, though with faster sequential access.
# BEDO RAM: Burst Extended Data Output RAM. This is just like the EDO RAM except that it is read from in bursts (meaning faster). It's better than EDO, but probably not the way to go.
# SDRAM: Synchronous Dynamic RAM supports BUS speeds up to 100 MHz. While EDO RAM (typically rated from 60ns to 70ns) only seems to be able to keep up with 83 MHz BUS speeds, SDRAM (available from 6ns to 10ns) doesn't seem to offer that much performance difference, other than its ability to keep up with the 100MHz bus.
# SGRAM: Synchronous Graphics RAM. Single-ported RAM for some (non-professional) graphics accelerators. It's supposed to provide about 5% more bandwidth than the EDO cousins.
# VRAM: Typically only used on graphics accelerators, this is a dual-ported memory, meaning that you can read from memory and write to screen at the same time. It significantly performs faster than its EDO or plain ol' DRAM cousins.
# WRAM: What the heck does Window's RAM mean? Nothing, but this is also a dual-ported memory. It's supposed to be faster (and is) than VRAM because the memory used is also static (meaning it does not have to be refreshed) instead of dynamic (requiring the CPU to refresh the memory every few clock cycles). If you can afford it, this is the type of video memory you'll want.
# MDRAM: Multi-banked Dynamic RAM. So far, it's only used on the ET6000 chipset-based graphics accelerators. It's supposed to provide more bandwidth than DRAM or EDO RAM through bank switching. For anyone who's serious about bandwidth (high resolution and color depths), it's still best to stick with VRAM or WRAM based cards.
+ ROM: It stands for Read Only Memory. The name is self-explanatory. Your BIOS is an example of ROM. It is done so that when the computer powers down, the data is not lost. Another example of ROM is CD-ROM. Since you can't write to a CD, the reason for the name should be obvious.
+ Storage device (Hard drives, CD-ROM, Zip drives, etc.): Since most computers don't remain on forever and RAM is fairly expensive (about $2 per Megabyte -- There was a time when a single Megabyte of RAM cost $50, back when we didn't have televisions, or fire, and we had to kill our own food, with bare hands no less.), the data your computer needs and manipulates has to be stored elsewhere. For most computers, this means that the data is stored on the hard drive (about $0.05 per Megabyte). This way your data (programs, games, letters, homework, etc.) is not lost when your computer is turned off. CD-ROM's, Iomega Zip or Jaz drives, Sysquest, tape drives, floppy diskettes, punch cards and etc. are all alternative ways to store your data.
The Operating System
As smart or amazing as you might think your computer is, it actually doesn't do a damn thing without being told exactly what to do. Furthermore, even as individualistic and unique as you think you are, you're not. What this means is that most of the things that you need a computer to do are exactly the same kind of things that other people need their computers to do. The end result is that these quite common routines can be programmed once, saved on disk and recalled when needed. Operating systems like MS-DOS, Windows, Linux, etc. are really just bundled packages of such little programs. They let you delete, copy, save and display files without having to type in (or even know) the complicated computer instructions. All you need to know is the name of the file (i.e. copy, rename, delete, or double-clicking on an icon). Pretty spiffy, huh? Other programs that you buy (games, word processing, etc.), operate on top of the OS. This means that these programs utilize some of the complicated computer instructions that came with the OS without having to include the instructions in the program itself. Therefore, you can't buy a program written for a Macintosh and run it on your PC. However, emulators do exist to allow you to run Mac stuff on a PC, or vice versa. So which operating system should you run?
Well, as I'm sure most of you are quite aware, Microsoft has pretty much won the operating systems war. Other (and better) operating systems do exist, such as IBM's O/S 2, Linux, or even the Macintosh OS. However, since most software programs you find on the open market are written for Microsoft, for convenience sake, you run a less elegant and robust OS. Remember the VHS-Beta war? Better doesn't always win.
The Software
Remember when I said most people use their computers for exactly the same things? Well, some people are a little more unique or demanding of their computers. So when someone wants their computer to do something new, they'll have to (or somehow persuade someone else to) sit down and write the complicated computer codes to instruct the computer on how to do whatever it is that they want their computer to do. If the resulting software program is actually useful or interesting, it generally becomes popular and you eventually get to buy it off the shelf somewhere. This means that the person or company that wrote the program makes a few bucks. This also keeps everyone continually working on newer and (maybe) better software. Simply stated, software extends the capabilities of your computer.
The Hardware
This is not meant as an exhaustive tutorial, just a quick overview to explain some of the more arcane computer mumbo jumbo that you hear all the time. Some of the things that I say aren't true in the strictest sense, but true enough for the purposes here. For a more in depth explanation, go to Tom's Hardware & Performance Page.
Your computer's hardware is the stuff that takes up physical space. Generally, any given computer will have a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and a case (and probably a printer and all sorts of cables). However, I'll assume you know what they are and look like. Now for the more confusing stuff that sits inside the case.
* Motherboard: The motherboard is the big green board that everything plugs into. You could say it's the mother of all computer circuit boards. Its function is to complete the circuits between all the other various components of your computer and provides power and pathways for data to travel. Motherboards come with different design, I/O bus architectures, chipsets, and cache configuration. It might be tempting to save a few bucks by buying cheap motherboards, but it's not a good idea to skimp on something that connects everything together on your computer.
o BIOS: Basic Input Output System. The BIOS is a set of instructions that tells your CPU how to communicate with the chipset (see below). Different BIOS's exist for different chipsets because, well, the instructions need to be different for different chips. Some BIOS's are also better than other BIOS's. As with all programmed instructions, there always exists the possibility (probability) of bugs.
o Chipset: It's a group of chips that tell your computer how to communicate with and control everything that you plug into your computer. However, you should note that the chipset only contains enough instruction to communicate with the peripherals at a very rudimentary level. To get your computer to use whatever hardware you plug into it (e.g. printers, modems, mice, etc.), you need to load the proper software drivers (computer instructions specifically written for specific hardware). The chipset just provides a common way for the computer to talk to the hardware. Today, Intel has pretty much cornered the market with Triton Chipsets. For what it's worth, they're (usually) pretty damn good chipsets. If you buy something else just to save a couple of bucks, I believe the expression goes something like, "you're not the brightest light on the block, are you?"
o I/O bus architecture: Simply stated, the bus is how the data travels between various components in your computer.
+ Slot-1: It's Intel's proprietary design (read: Intel royalties on every motherboard sold with the slot-1 design) for the Pentium II CPU to motherboard interface. Its value was/is somewhat questionable, other than to further fatten Intel's bottom line. There's also talk of a Slot-2...
+ Socket-7: This is the common CPU to motherboard interface for Intel Pentium and Pentium MMX, AMD K6 and K6-2, Cyrix PR and Media GL, and IDT Winchips. Its popularity is probably due to the fact that Intel doesn't own the design. You can use any of the aforementioned CPUs in a socket-7 motherboard as long as the the motherboard's BIOS has support for it.
+ AGP: Advanced Graphics Port is a semi-recent addition to accommodate the need for transferring large texture bitmaps (read: playing games) from your system's main memory to the graphics accelerator's memory. While it looks great on paper, there's quite a bit of debate as to its usefulness in the real world.
+ PCI: Peripheral Component Interconnect is one of the newer and most dominant bus architectures. It allows more data to flow through your computer (wider bandwidth). The graphics intensive (high bandwidth) computer environment of today demands PCI. It's supposed to be the everlasting bus architecture of today and tomorrow. Keep in mind that the same computer gurus once thought using more than 640K of RAM was inconceivable. It supports a 64-bit data path and allows for Plug and Play (PnP). PnP is supposed to allow you to plug a card into your computer, turn it on, and have everything working fine and dandy without fiddling with any jumpers. However, the experience is more like Plug and Pray. It was much simpler just changing a few jumpers. Personally, I disable PnP and set the settings manually whenever possible.
+ VLB: VESA Local Bus was also developed because of the bandwidth problem. It was mostly a favorite of graphics adaptors because it supported a 32-bit data path and up to a 40 MHz clock. However, it was a quick fix for the time, and today's graphics have outgrown the VLB.
+ EISA: Enhanced Industry Standard Architecture is pretty much obsolete. It was designed to support the 32-bit data path and background transfers without the CPU, but was never met with much public acceptance.
+ ISA: Industry Standard Architecture is still widely used today. It is an old 16-bit bus architecture with very little bandwidth. Its main advantage is that it is cheap and is used for low bandwidth-demanding cards like your modem, sound, or game card. It's a good idea to have at least 3 or 4 ISA slots on your motherboard. Most adaptors are still ISA's.
o CPU (Central Processing Unit): The most obvious analogy is the brain. Although brains are autonomous and CPU's are more like autistic Charlie Babbots. Either way, the CPU handles and manipulates all of the data in your computer. CPU's are rated in MegaHertz. That's techobabble for how many times a second your computer performs a set of calculations. A CPU rated at 60 MHz clears its clock 60 million times a second. A CPU rated at 120 MHz clears its clock 120 million times a second, yielding a 200% improvement in speed over its 60 MHz cousin, and so on. CPU's have greatly improved in speed, while the other components have not. No matter how fast your CPU is, it can't perform any calculations if it doesn't have any data to manipulate. It might be wiser spending the money on more RAM or a faster hard drive. Strive for some balance in your life.
o Video/Graphics card: The best computer on earth isn't going to do you any good if you can't see the results of its amazing powers. The video card converts the digital signals inside your computer to analog signals that your monitor can display. Various graphics accelerator cards exist to speed up your graphics display. More memory is generally better, but different types of memory exist.
o I/O Controller Card: As the name suggests, the Input/Output controller card controls the data that moves in and out of your computer. Typically, the mouse or external modems are plugged into your I/O controller card. Today, the I/O controller is generally built into your motherboard.
o Memory:
+ Random Access Memory (RAM): This is one of the most important components of the computer that most people tend to ignore. The CPU only manipulates data. How fast your computer performs tasks depends on how fast data can be fed into your CPU. RAM is rated in nanoseconds (10^ -9), while your hard drive is rated in milliseconds (10^ -3). Once your computer is out of physical RAM, the data is read from your hard drive. The speed difference between how fast data is fed into your CPU is typically 70 nsec for RAM and 10 msec for your hard drive. That means as soon as you're out of RAM, your computer is about 140,000 times slower! Even if you've got the newest 200 MHz Pentium, the speed improvement over a 60 MHz Pentium is only 3.3 times. It doesn't take Einstein to figure out which is more important if you're really interested in speed and performance.
# SRAM: Static RAM. This is a very high quality of RAM that does not need to be refreshed (DRAM based chips need refreshing every few clock cycles, otherwise the charge fades). This is typically only used for caching data from the slower RAM due to the expense.
# DRAM: It's nothing fancy, just the regular Dynamic RAM that's in your computer, typically rated 60 or 70 ns. It's single-ported, which means only one port for accessing data-either writing or reading. Therefore, the reading and writing cannot be done at the same time, making it necessary for waiting to occur.
# EDO RAM: Extended Data Output RAM. This is basically the same thing as your DRAM, but generally 5-20% faster. Also single-ported, though with faster sequential access.
# BEDO RAM: Burst Extended Data Output RAM. This is just like the EDO RAM except that it is read from in bursts (meaning faster). It's better than EDO, but probably not the way to go.
# SDRAM: Synchronous Dynamic RAM supports BUS speeds up to 100 MHz. While EDO RAM (typically rated from 60ns to 70ns) only seems to be able to keep up with 83 MHz BUS speeds, SDRAM (available from 6ns to 10ns) doesn't seem to offer that much performance difference, other than its ability to keep up with the 100MHz bus.
# SGRAM: Synchronous Graphics RAM. Single-ported RAM for some (non-professional) graphics accelerators. It's supposed to provide about 5% more bandwidth than the EDO cousins.
# VRAM: Typically only used on graphics accelerators, this is a dual-ported memory, meaning that you can read from memory and write to screen at the same time. It significantly performs faster than its EDO or plain ol' DRAM cousins.
# WRAM: What the heck does Window's RAM mean? Nothing, but this is also a dual-ported memory. It's supposed to be faster (and is) than VRAM because the memory used is also static (meaning it does not have to be refreshed) instead of dynamic (requiring the CPU to refresh the memory every few clock cycles). If you can afford it, this is the type of video memory you'll want.
# MDRAM: Multi-banked Dynamic RAM. So far, it's only used on the ET6000 chipset-based graphics accelerators. It's supposed to provide more bandwidth than DRAM or EDO RAM through bank switching. For anyone who's serious about bandwidth (high resolution and color depths), it's still best to stick with VRAM or WRAM based cards.
+ ROM: It stands for Read Only Memory. The name is self-explanatory. Your BIOS is an example of ROM. It is done so that when the computer powers down, the data is not lost. Another example of ROM is CD-ROM. Since you can't write to a CD, the reason for the name should be obvious.
+ Storage device (Hard drives, CD-ROM, Zip drives, etc.): Since most computers don't remain on forever and RAM is fairly expensive (about $2 per Megabyte -- There was a time when a single Megabyte of RAM cost $50, back when we didn't have televisions, or fire, and we had to kill our own food, with bare hands no less.), the data your computer needs and manipulates has to be stored elsewhere. For most computers, this means that the data is stored on the hard drive (about $0.05 per Megabyte). This way your data (programs, games, letters, homework, etc.) is not lost when your computer is turned off. CD-ROM's, Iomega Zip or Jaz drives, Sysquest, tape drives, floppy diskettes, punch cards and etc. are all alternative ways to store your data.
The Operating System
As smart or amazing as you might think your computer is, it actually doesn't do a damn thing without being told exactly what to do. Furthermore, even as individualistic and unique as you think you are, you're not. What this means is that most of the things that you need a computer to do are exactly the same kind of things that other people need their computers to do. The end result is that these quite common routines can be programmed once, saved on disk and recalled when needed. Operating systems like MS-DOS, Windows, Linux, etc. are really just bundled packages of such little programs. They let you delete, copy, save and display files without having to type in (or even know) the complicated computer instructions. All you need to know is the name of the file (i.e. copy, rename, delete, or double-clicking on an icon). Pretty spiffy, huh? Other programs that you buy (games, word processing, etc.), operate on top of the OS. This means that these programs utilize some of the complicated computer instructions that came with the OS without having to include the instructions in the program itself. Therefore, you can't buy a program written for a Macintosh and run it on your PC. However, emulators do exist to allow you to run Mac stuff on a PC, or vice versa. So which operating system should you run?
Well, as I'm sure most of you are quite aware, Microsoft has pretty much won the operating systems war. Other (and better) operating systems do exist, such as IBM's O/S 2, Linux, or even the Macintosh OS. However, since most software programs you find on the open market are written for Microsoft, for convenience sake, you run a less elegant and robust OS. Remember the VHS-Beta war? Better doesn't always win.
The Software
Remember when I said most people use their computers for exactly the same things? Well, some people are a little more unique or demanding of their computers. So when someone wants their computer to do something new, they'll have to (or somehow persuade someone else to) sit down and write the complicated computer codes to instruct the computer on how to do whatever it is that they want their computer to do. If the resulting software program is actually useful or interesting, it generally becomes popular and you eventually get to buy it off the shelf somewhere. This means that the person or company that wrote the program makes a few bucks. This also keeps everyone continually working on newer and (maybe) better software. Simply stated, software extends the capabilities of your computer.
