A computer has certain basic components. I'll try to keep this in English, hopefully:



Case: or tower, different sizes, shapes and colors these days are available.

Motherboard: This is the unit that hold's everything together. It's like the frame of your car, everything is bolted to it.

Central Processing Unit: CPU or processor or Chip, this is the little fan dangled object that does all the smart stuff so you can do whatever task's you'll need to do with your computer.

Random Access Memory: known as RAM or just memory. The more and the faster it runs the better.

Power Supply and adaptors: takes power from the wall and gives it to the board which powers up everything else.

Video display: VGA adapter or graphics adapter. If you'll be playing games you'll want a large one of these.

Removable Media: storage device of some sort, floppy drive, CD, DVD, Media card. This is basically anything your computer can put information on that you can walk away with.

Internal Storage: known as your hard disk or hard drive or just 'drive'. This is an extremely fast spinning device that stores all your files and your operating system.

Networking cards: if you don't know what this is you probly don't need to. It's most commonly used for connecting more than one computer together in a network or to get your computer out to the internet.

Basics of computer shopping:

Shop around (:--). Ask allot of questions, safest bet will be to stick to brand names. Dell, Compaq/HP is good or your local store will have there own recommendations. Basically you are going to want a computer with the largest CPU, most amount of RAM, and largest hard drive etc. Those are the most important that will effect speed. These days a decent speed tower for 2006 is 3GHZ CPU, 1 Gig Ram, 250 Gig hard disk. Basically get the biggest baddest computer possible for the least amount of donuts (dollars).

Computer technology is moving ahead in leaps and bounds. Here are some other terms you may have heard before and wondered what they meant.

So what's a 'web server'?

Just a name for a computer that 'serves' out files to people that have requested them. When you visit a web page you will be requesting some computer located somewhere in the world to upload that webpage from their computer to yours. Since their files are the ones serving the files to you they are called 'web servers'. Sort of like when you are on MSN and you send a picture of someone from your computer to theirs. In this case your computer is actually 'serving' the files to theirs.

Load Balancing Web Server - getting techie here.

Today millions of computers are connected to the Internet with hundreds of millions of sites combined. Some servers like search engines and email servers get a huge number of visitors. If the number of visitors to any one site increases the page loading takes more time since the server has to handle all these visitors simultaneously and serve out or upload those files to the computer that has requested to view that web page. The solution to such a problem is called load balancing. The load is distributed by the load balancing web server to other linked computers and processors to reduce computing time and communicate with the visitor computers who have requested the webpage.

Laptops - pretty cool if you need it.

Laptops are portable computers called laptops because they are usually used with the computer placed on the lap of the user. Laptops weigh between 3 to 4 kgs and run on batteries. The falling price levels have popularized laptops to a great extent. The present day laptops are light, have exceptional computing power, are affordable, and have sleek aesthetic appeal. They are used in various applications like programming large machines like CNC machines, Co-ordinate measuring machines etc. As laptops are transported a lot, a water resistant model is very much desirable. Panasonic has launched a waterproof laptop model available in Japan. Though not completely waterproof, it is resistant to coffee or water spills. There are commercial laptop variants available like the Dell latitude which is very popular. The latitude has Intel dual core processors, weighs 4.7 pounds, has 2MB L2 cache, has wide aspect screens of 12, 14 and 15 inches and larger, 512 MB RAM and 4 USB ports. More ram the merrier I say!

Tablet PCs.

Tablet PCs are portable, slate shaped hand-held computers. A tablet PC consists of a hand held touch screen to be used with a light pen or stylus. The stylus is used to write on the touch screen. Most commonly used for personal one on one presentations.

Summary.

Computers have impacted our society in an enormous way. Computers are used in thousands of applications worldwide and are moving into new fields everyday. I hope this article has shed some light on an often misunderstood topic since computers really are quite simple.