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You probably wouldn’t believe me, but you have a device on your computer that has has lasers and high-speed motors that use up just a couple of Watts. Such devices are better known as optical drives. Whether you have a Blu-Ray, CD, or DVD drive doesn’t matter; they all work the same, much like how all banks screw you over in the same manner with a little touch of their own personality.
If you’re reading this, you’ve probably heard of a hard drive (HDD) or solid state drive (SSD), and you might even have a slight understanding of what purpose it serves on your computer. The deeper you dive into its workings, the better you understand how it affects your computer’s behavior. Let’s get our hands dirty, shall we?
Today, we’re going to talk about the thing that makes your computer more than a simple calculator – random access memory (RAM). In an earlier part of this series, we went over the memory slots on the motherboard, but the simple description provided in that part isn’t sufficient to fully describe how RAM works. In the computing world, RAM can make or break your computer’s performance, sometimes more than the CPU.
You learned before about bits & bytes and how the binary system works. This is an extension to the previous binary part, and serves a good purpose if you don’t understand the concept of the measurement of a quantity of data. You’ve probably heard of kilobytes, megabytes, and gigabytes, but it’s still just a meaningless concept unless you fully understand them. I promise you that this is going to be short and easy, not boring and complicated like the previous … Continue reading
While writing the RAM part of the series, I found out that you probably would get lost if I didn’t explain binary data (bits and bytes) to you. If you’re already familiar with this concept, I didn’t mean to insult your knowledge, Mr. Know-It-All! Your computer communicates with binary data, and it’s important for you to know how it works before moving on. Even if you feel comfortable with binary, you might want to read up on this to refresh … Continue reading
Hey kids! Today we’re going to look into the brain of the computer, a small chip known as the Central Processing Unit (CPU). This chip, which sits gently on the motherboard’s CPU socket, does all the number crunching in your computer. Everything you see on your screen has passed through the CPU in one way or another, and you’re about to see how the little piece of carton and metal does this.
No, you didn’t get off the hook. The motherboard portion of the “How Computers Work” series actually needs a third part to fully encompass the beauty of the works of this complex piece of hardware. In this part of the motherboard chapter in my mega series, I’m going to describe the rest of the motherboard, and try to keep it simple. If you got lost in the previous part of the series, don’t hesitate to ask questions. It offers a … Continue reading
I’m back with another part of the big bad and ugly motherboard discussion. In this part of the series, I’m going to go over some of the pieces in every motherboard made since I was seven years old.
Almost everything on your computer goes through the motherboard, including pictures of your colleague’s ugly dog before they go across the web. Despite looking extremely complex, a motherboard serves one simple function: It links all the components connected to your computer to each other so they can communicate and give you everything you see in the screen. This is one of those pieces, just like the PSU, which prevent your computer from becoming a large paper weight.
Hey kids! Today we’re going to talk about the power supply and how just about every 28 days it…. Wait, wrong discussion. All failed puns aside, your power supply (PSU) is the most important part of your computer because everything your computer does relies on this piece. Without it, your computer becomes an overpriced paperweight, even if you bought one for $3.
