General concepts of ICT systems

 Know what is meant by the terms ‘hardware’ and ‘software’  Understand the difference between systems software and applications software  Be able to  define hardware, giving examples;  define software, giving examples;  describe the difference between hardware and software

 Hardware is the physical parts of the computer system – the parts that you can touch and see.  A motherboard, a CPU, a keyboard and a monitor are all items of hardware.

 Your hardware is all of the parts that make up your body: bones, muscles, skin, blood, etc.

We will look at each of these in more detail in a future lesson. Other examples include: Scanner Web cam Camera Fan

We will look at each of these in more detail in a future lesson. Other examples include: Graphics card IDE ribbon Power supply Fan

 A peripheral is any hardware device which connects to the computer and is controlled by the Central Processing Unit (CPU) -with the exception of memory.  When you are trying to think of examples of peripherals, think of things which plug into the back of the box.  Examples are:  monitor  keyboard  mouse  printer  scanner  speakers  external hard drives

 Software is a collection of instructions that can be ‘run’ on a computer. These instructions tell the computer what to do.

 To continue the analogy… Your software is all of your thoughts and mental processes: these are the instructions that tell your physical body what to do

 Software is not a physical thing (but it can of course be stored on a physical medium such as a CD-ROM), it is just a bunch of codes.  An operating system such as Windows XP or Mac OS X, applications such as Microsoft Word, and the instructions that control a robot are all examples of software.

 Computer hardware is the physical components that make up the computer system. Hardware is useless without software to run on it.  Software is instructions that tell computer hardware what to do. Software is useless unless there is hardware to run it on.  For a computer system to be useful it has to consist of both hardware and software. +

 Your physical body cannot function without your thoughts - and your thoughts need a physical body to exist within

 There are two main types of software which you will learn about in detail later on.  The first is 'systems software' which basically controls the way the computer works and tells it what to do. Examples include:  Operating System  Utilities  User Interface

 The other type of software is called ‘applications software' and it is this type of software that you use to do your work and have fun. Some examples include:  Word processors such as Microsoft Word  Spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel  Databases such as Microsoft Access  Games applications such as Half Life, Call of Duty etc

 A Utility program is designed to do one or perhaps two tasks very well and nothing else.  For example, you may want to compress a file to let you save it on to a floppy disk. For this task you would choose to use a file compression utility program.compress a file

 Quite often, a Utility program is built right in to the operating system. For example Windows XP has a built in 'Zip' compression utility you can use to compress a file or folder.

 File management  Backup management  Disk Defragmenter

Here are some very common tasks that are carried out by various Utility programs:  File sorting  File renaming  File conversion (e.g. convert a sound file to MP3)  File repair  Disk monitoring and defragmentation (defragging)  Printing jobs  Backing up data.  Anti-Virus  Note that a utility program only does one or perhaps two of these.

 A driver is another essential piece of system software  A driver is a specially written program which translates the commands from the operating system into commands that a piece of hardware (eg a printer) will understand.

 Each piece of hardware e.g. printer, monitor, scanner, keyboard etc will have its own driver.  Printers from different manufacturers work in different ways, so a printer from Samsung will need a different driver than a printer from HP, Canon or Dell.

 If you try to use a device without the correct driver, then it probably won’t work. If you do manage to get your new printer working without installing its driver, it will probably just print rubbish!  This is what comes out of a printer with the correct driver installed: This is a printout  This is what comes out of the printer with the incorrect driver installed: Jajshu fuau&(( 89asd 8fa8s9d

 When you buy a new piece of hardware, it will usually come with an installation disk which will load the new drivers into the operating system. Very often, you can also download the drivers from the internet.

Wiki page/ICT Basics Hardware & Software: 2 x Read, Activity, Test MAKE NOTES IN YOUR BOOKS!