Review of Basic Information and Communication Technology Concepts: Hardware (Part 1)

The Computer System

The computing system is called a system because it is a composed of different elements – that is, types of interrelated devices: hardware, software and peopleware. Each of these types of devices is important for the system to work. The computer system cannot work without any one of these 'wares'.

Besides reviewing what these are, we will discuss how knowing each of these interact with the other elements can help you troubleshoot in case your computer for some reason does not work.

Hardware

Hardware refers to the tangible objects or devices, such as your desktop monitor, the keyboard, or the mouse. Hardware, in the context of computing system, are composed of three types: Input, Output, Processing and Storage.

Input

Input hardware refers to devices you use to enter instructions or data into the computer. Examples of this are the keyboard, the mouse and the scanner. Other non-critical parts of the computer system which are input devices are the laser presenter and optical character recognition (OCR).

Processing

Processing hardware refers to the internal brain of your computer, the one that really “computes” the instructions based on a set of instructions that were preconfigured to it. This refers to your CPU, and the performance of your CPU is based on the speed (measured in gigahertz or GHz).

Storage

A very important part of your computing system is storage of data. There are numerous incarnations of storage devices: USB flash disks, compact discs (CD), digital versatile discs (DVD), memory sticks, secure digital (SD) cards, among others. This is measured in megabytes (MB), gigabytes (GB, which is 1,000 MB) and terabytes (TB, which is 1,000GB).

Output

Output devices refer to hardware that get data out of the computer. This may come in the form of monitor, LCD projector and printer.

Looking at a Computer's Features

When you buy a laptop or a computer, you may get a lot of highly technical references, such as “DDRAM” or “2GB RAM”. In this section, we will discuss what those are:

• RAM – random access memory. You could look at this as the space where the computer temporarily writes instruction before it is executed (after which, the data is erased). Generally, the higher the number, the better.
• Processor – Measured in GHz (so far as when this book was written), this refers to the speed of the processor to write and erase information. Generally speaking, the higher the number, the better.
• Optical Drive – This refers to your CD or DVD reader or writer. A DVD writer (DVD-R/W) usually means that it can also read and write CDs. If it only says CD-R, that means it can only read data from CD, and cannot write on it nor read and write DVDs. Another data that you would probably find is “52X,” and this refers to the speed of your optical drive. The higher this is, the better.
• RJ-11 / RJ-45 / LAN Ports – These are ports or entries for networking. RJ-11 refers to the end of your telephone cable, which you would use if you connect via dial-up. RJ-45 refers to the end of a cable or DSL internet connection. RJ-45 may also add up to what rate of data it can handle, measured in mbps (Megabits per second) or gbps (Gigabits per second).
• USB port – Of course, this refers to the number of USB ports the computer has. If it has something like 1.2 or 2.0, this refers to the type of USB capability. Again, the higher the number, the faster the data rate of that USB port.
• Audio and Video Cards – These are cards inside the computer which connect to the motherboard (the board where the CPU is connected to). These cards tell up to what type of applications your computer can accommodate in terms of those functions. For example, if you have a low-end video card, you probably cannot use the computer for games or video editing. Further, higher-end video and audio cards mean faster response time when you tell your computer to do something and it to display what you commanded it to do.
• WiFi / WLAN / 802.11a/b/g/n – Wifi is wireless fidelity. WLAN is wireless local area network (We will discuss this in detail “Networking.”). They are essentially the same. The number refers to the IEEE standard for ethernet connection (Again, we will discuss this in detail in Networking.). The letter “a/b/g/n” refers to the version. “a” is used for your cordless phone, “b” is for wireless routers and has speed of up to 11 mbps and range of 30 feet from the center. “g” has up to 54 mbps. “n” promises to double the speed and triple the range of “g.”
• Hard Disk / Hard Drive / Storage – The amount of data you could store in a computer. A 'hard disk' is not a literal hard disk, but derives its name from the old concept of putting multiple disks on top of one another. A 'hard drive,' which in essence is the same as a hard disk, is used to refer to an alphabetical reference in a drive, or a destination for your computer to store data to or get data from. That is, a disk drive is a letter reference, and a hard drive is a drive which has a hard disk. The higher, the better, but you have to be careful—the higher amount of data you put in a disk, the more data you could lose if the disk drive crashes.
• Floppy Disk / Floppy Drive – A rather old mode of data storage. Mini floppy disks were 5.25” and could hold up to 1.22 megabytes of data while micro floppy disks were 3.5” and could hold up to 1.44 megabytes of data.

Disclaimer: Please feel free to send your corrections in the comments section.