Breanna Ward
February 19, 2014
CMP 101 8:00-8:50
What's inside your computer? There are seven major components and additional devices that allows your computer to run correctly. The seven major components of a computer are motherboard, cpu, ram, power supply, optical drive, video card, . All of these parts are essential to the computer and how it functions.
The motherboard is the heart of the computer everything sits or connects to it. It is the main circuit board its connects directly or indirectly to every part of the computer. The motherboard is a thin square/rectangular plate that holds the cpu, memory, expansion cards to control video and audio and connectors for the hard drive and optical drive. In today's motherboards most contain USB ports and other ports such as HDMI and firewire that can be used with compatible devices.
A CPU (Central Processing Unit) is located inside the computer, it can also be called the processor or the brain of the computer. The CPU is usually located on the motherboard under the the heatsink fan. This processor runs the software and processes the data that you are working on. The speed of a CPU is measured by megahertz (MHz) a million instructions per second or by gigahertz (GHz) a billion instructions per second. Many programmers usually leave a picture or quote on the chip but need a microscope to see it.
Random Access Memory or RAM for short, holds the data and software that you are running. Adding RAM to your computer is an easy way to speed it up it usually has four banks of it. It contains short term memory that disappears when your computer turns off. In this case when working on any type of documents or files you need to save it to avoid losing it. RAM is measured by megabytes or gigabytes, the more RAM you have the faster your computer runs.
Also on the motherboard, it contains a video card which is connected by a special video card slot. The video card is what produces images and videos on your computer monitor, most motherboards accept an AGP or PCP video card. Serious game programmers upgrade their video cards every three to six months to get the best performance.The latest thing now is to either have two or even four video cards in a machine
The power supply which usually sits at the top of the case supplies the computer