Hardware and Software By: Kyle Face

Hardware!

Main computer hardware components Hardware refers to the physical components of a computer (What you can see and touch). It consists of interconnected devices that control the operations of a computer.  - The Central Processing Unit (CPU)  - Motherboard  - Hard drive  - RAM  - Sound Card  - Graphics Card

Software!

Software elements of a Computer Software refers to the collection of electronic instructions that tell your computer what to do. A computer program that is installed onto your computer.  - System Software – Is a computer program that coordinates the activities of a computer.  - Application software – Is a computer program that performs a specific task.

Different examples of Software  - Word Processing – Microsoft word  - Spreadsheets – Microsoft excel  - Computer presentations – Microsoft PowerPoint  - Database management – Microsoft access  - Desktop publishing – Adobe PageMaker and Microsoft publisher  - Graphics – AUTOCAD  - Multimedia – Macromedia  Entertainment – League of Legends, Call of Duty.

Data Can be classified as formatted data, text, image, audio, and video.  - Formatted data – Includes the numerical or alphabetical data.  - Text – Is a series of letters, numbers, and other characters.  - Image – Is data in the form of picture, a graph, or a hand-drawn picture.  - Audio – Is data in the form of sounds.  - Video – Combined pictures that are displayed to portray action.

Elective Hardware  The functions of hardware within a computer system – - Input - Output - Process - Storage - Control

Input  Input refers to the data, software, or institutions that we enter into the computer. Input devices are computer components with the help of which we enter programs, data etc. into the computer. Some examples of input devices are the keyboard, mouse, trackball, and light pen.

Output  Computer output devices are used to provide information for a user in different forms. The formats include visual, audio and digital. A CPU is responsible for processing the instructions and the devices are responsible in outputting the processed information in different formats depending on the type of output device we have.  When we talk about output devices, some of the devices in this group can do both the input and the output process. These kinds of devices enable us to provide information to it and receive information from it. Touch screen is an example of input/output device.

Storage  FUNCTIONS OF COMPUTER STORAGE.  Computer storage is important to help users store programs and data to be used at a later time.  It is also useful to keep current data while being processed by the processor until the information  is saved in a storage media such as a hard disk or a diskette. Computer storage also stores  instructions from a computer program.  TYPES OF COMPUTER STORAGE  There are two type of computer storage; primary storage and secondary storage.  Primary storage is known as the main memory of a computer, including RAM (Random-Access  Memory) and ROM (Read-Only Memory). It is an internal memory (inside the CPU) that can be  accessed directly by the processor.  Primary storage is installed internally. Two main types of primary  storage are RAM and ROM. Data from RAM can be read or retrieved  and written or stored during processing whereas data from ROM can  just be read only.  RAM is volatile, which means the program and data will be lost when  the computer is turned off. ROM is non-volatile which means it holds  the programs and data even when the computer is turned off.

Control  A control unit is circuitry that directs operations within the computer's processor by directing the input and output of a computer system. The processor then controls how the rest of the computer operates (giving directions to the other parts and systems). A control unit works by gathering input through a series of commands it receives from instructions in a running programs and then outputs those commands into control signals that the computer and other hardware attached to the computer carry out.  The control unit is basically circuitry inside the CPU, controlling the operations inside the CPU and "directing traffic" in a sense. The functions a control unit performs can depend on the type of CPU, since the varying degrees of architecture between all the different CPUs determine the functions of the control unit.

How do a variety of input, output, storage and CPU devices and components achieve their purpose  A computer software is a list of instructions that tells a computer how to work a specific task. An operating system is a collection of programs the allows the computer to communicate with the hardware and to work together and a computer has a memory which is used to store data. There are two types of storage in a computer, primary storage and secondary storage. Primary storage is where the computer holds data that it is currently using. This place also known as computer memory or temporary storage. The cpu is the most important component in a computer. It acts like a brain. CPU contains thousands of electrical circuits and is built on a wafer of silicon called a chip. There are many kinds of chips in a computer, each containing many electrical circuits. Microprocessor is the chip that is used for the CPU of a computer which is used to process information.

The existence of minimum hardware requirements to run some software  To be used efficiently, all computer software needs certain hardware components or other software resources to be present on a computer. These prerequisites are known as (computer) system requirements and are often used as a guideline as opposed to an absolute rule. Most software defines two sets of system requirements: minimum and recommended. With increasing demand for higher processing power and resources in newer versions of software, system requirements tend to increase over time. Industry analysts suggest that this trend plays a bigger part in driving upgrades to existing computer systems than technological advancements. A second meaning of the term of System requirements, is a generalisation of this first definition, giving the requirements to be met in the design of a system or sub-system. Typically an organisation starts with a set of Business requirements and then derives the System requirements from there.

The Fetch-Execute Cycle  The sequence of actions that a central processing unit performs to execute each machine code instruction in a program. At the beginning of each cycle the CPU presents the value of the program counter on the address bus. The CPU then fetches the instruction from main memory (possibly via a cache and/or a pipeline) via the data bus into the instruction register. From the instruction register, the data forming the instruction is decoded and passed to the control unit which sends a sequence of control signals to the relevant function units o f the CPU to perform theactions required by the instruction such as reading va lues from registers, passing them to the ALU to addthem together and writing the result back to a register. The program counter is then incremented to address the next instruction and the cycle is repeated. The fetch-execute cycle was first proposed by John von Neumann.