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COMPUTER EDUCATION 101
Alright, folks. Time for a reality check.
Watching the development path that Apple is taking these days is breaking my heart a bit. Just like our broken public education system, they are dead-set on appealling to the lowest common denominator. They don’t want to teach you even a little bit of how to fish, they just want to give a you a big shiny icon of a fish in the middle of your screen. It seems developers want to turn us all into finger pointing apes that say “Oooooh, pretty picture of fish, I touch and I get fish!!”
I’m not saying a computer that has a good level of simplicity is a bad thing. I’m not saying that everyone should know how to run a computer purely from a command line. What I *am* saying however is this:
You have a responsibility to acquire some amount of personal understanding
about the devices you hand important parts of your life over to.
Where computers are concerned, this means you actually have a responsibility to understand some basic concepts of how they work and how to maintain them. We are in very serious danger of handing far too much of this responsibility to a smaller and smaller group of people. Consider this in the light of how much information and items of personal value we store on these machines. If you want to be at the mercy of tech support people and crazy waiting times at an Apple Store to solve the most elementary of problems, be my guest. If not, read on and take some control back of your digital life. You need to know how to change a tire on a car, right? This is no different.
For some of you, this is like learning how to add. But for many, it will be new. So here we go, we’ll start with the building blocks....
BASIC COMPONENTS OF A COMPUTER
INSIDE THE MACHINE
HARD DRIVE (HD)
This where your computer stores all the information it needs to run, and all of your files. It is the one internal component you have the most direct control over. The bigger a drive you have, the easier it is to keep the proper amount of free space available for your system to run smoothly.
This is what you often use to install software, burn music/photo CD’s, burn movie DVD’s, etc. It’s quickly becoming phased out as more and more people move to using portable devices for all those needs, and as online movie services become more widespread. In fact, many people are opting out of these for laptops and instead installing super-fast Solid State Drives, and a larger traditional hard drive.
This is your computer’s “workspace”. Programs and files are loaded from the Hard Drive into these chips to be used and worked on. This is honestly the most overlooked way to improve your computer’s performance. You should jam AS MUCH RAM AS IS POSSIBLE into your machine.... you will not regret it.
CPU (Central Processing Unit)
This is your computer’s “brain”. This is where all the actual work happens to make your computer do anything at all. The faster this unit is, the more programs can run at the same time, the quicker photo processing will be, etc. All modern computers have an addtional unit called a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) for handling what you actually see on the screen, leaving the CPU do the rest of the work you don’t directly see.
EXPANSION SLOTS (PCI, PCIe, PCIx)
These are places where additional components can be added to the machine. Examples would be more powerful video/graphic processing systems, professional audio hardware, or faster hard drive interfaces.
LOGIC BOARD
This is a single, large, and flat piece that all the above components are hooked into. Everything depends on it to be able to talk to everything else. It’s like a large piece of property that a neighborhood or town sits on. There are also many smaller components on here that you don’t have any direct control over that are crucial to the machine’s operation.
OUTSIDE THE MACHINE
KEYBOARD AND MOUSE
How you interact with your machine. Laptops use Trackpads now-a-days, and Apple’s are extremely powerful (see my article about BetterTouchTool).
MONITOR
Contrary to what a staggering amount of people think, this is simply your “window” into what’s going on in your machine. It is *NOT* the computer. It is just like the keyboard and mouse, in that it is merely part of how you interact with the computer.
I/O PORTS (Input/Output)
These are the jacks on the back of your tower or around the sides of your laptop. They allow your computer to talk to devices outside of itself. The most common type is USB, which allows for hooking up almost any device imaginable to your machine. Other types are FireWire (fast hard drive interface), audio jacks, and video outputs for your monitor.
If you can wrap your head around this basic beginning info, it will go a long way to helping you understand how your machine works. It will also help you to judge what’s important to you and what’s not when putting your next computer purchase together. Next time I’ll cover the basic software components that make up your computing experience.
In a later blog, I’m going to let you in on my method of maintaining a healthy computer that Apple would do well to teach all its customers. Then again, we should’ve had light bulbs and batteries that last 20 years already, right?
Till next time....