Chapter 6 part 2 Knowing your hardware

The Hard Drive: – With storage capacities topping 2Tb, a hard drive has the largest storage capacity of any storage devices, and the most economical. – Hard drive access times are measured in milliseconds (ms), meaning thousandths of seconds. For large-capacity drives, access time is approximately 12 milliseconds (less than one hundredth of a second. A DVD (optical drive) can take over 150 milliseconds to access data.

The Hard Drive: – Solid State Drives (SSDs) offers even faster access times because it uses the same kind of memory that your flash drive uses (not a spinning hard drive). 0.1ms is about the access time for an ssd. These are gaining popularity in notebook computer users because they produce less heat and use less energy than conventional hard drives. The only downside currently is the price tag. (the prices are dropping all of the time)

The Hard Drive: – Other types of hard drives: Older: IDE (integrated Drive Electronics) or PATA (parallel advanced technology attachment. More current: SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment or Serial ATA. These use thinner cables that transfer data much quicker.

The Hard Drive: – Big hard drive or two small ones together? RAID (redundant array of independent disks) is a set of strategies for using more than one drive in a system. RAID 0 and RAID 1 are the most popular. RAID 0: every time data is written to a hard drive, it is actually spread across 2. Imagine a card dealer dealing 52 cards to one person, then with RAID 0 imagine two dealers dealing 26 cards to two different people. It takes about half the time. RAID 1: all of the data written to one drive is also written to another drive. This is mainly for back up.

Video Cards: A video card or video adapter is an expansion card that is installed inside your system unit to translate binary data into images you view on your monitor. Video cards also control the number of colors your monitor can display, and the number of bits the video card uses to represent each pixel on the monitor (called bit depth). The more bits—the better the image appears. A 4-bit video card displays 16 colors (the minimum). A 24-bit card displays more than 16 million colors.

Sound Cards – The sound card is an expansion card like the video card. It translates binary into sound. Some cheap computers integrate this into the mother board. – Many computers ship with a 3d sound card. This is not quite surround sound, but advances sound technology past traditional stereo sound.

Sound Cards – Surround sound is a type of audio processing that makes the listener experience sound as if it were coming from all directions. The current standard is Dolby. Dolby takes digital sound and reproduces it in eight channels. Seven channels cover the listening field and 1 is a subwoofer. If you want this capability on your pc, look for a sound card that is Dolby Digital compatible.

How to make my system run faster – Clean out your startup folder—you may be running programs that use up RAM that you are not even using. – Clear out unnecessary files—temporary internet files can accumulate quickly on your hard drive. – Run spyware and adware removal programs – Run disk defragmenter utility

What if my system crashes often? – Check that you have enough RAM – Check that new software is properly installed – If you have an error code, visit Microsoft Knowledge base to find a patch