Test your knowledge

Hello everyone today I would like to take the time out to reinforce a few things we have been talking about over the past weeks. My method of this will be to provide a small self-assessment quiz to test how much you remember and if you can find the answers in my past posts.

Ready?

1. What is a network
   
2. What is the largest board inside a computer
   
3. What is RAM
   
4. What does "WWW" stand for
   
5. True or False an Inject printer uses a laser to produce images onto a drum then a piece of paper
   

Well I will let you guys wrestle with those questions J

Talk to you soon with a new post on the boot process of a windows computer.

 

Printers

Hello everyone and again as always welcome to my little space on the world wide web. My URL or web address is www.computertalkfornormalfoks.blogspot.com for those of you who would like to refer others to my site. Today we are going to talk about two common types of printers. Laser printers and Ink jet printers. Laser printers like injet printers are able to take write images and text to paper. Laser printers achieve this in a six step process. 1. Cleaning – excess toner is cleaned from a rotating drum 2. Conditioning – An electrical charge is placed on the drum. 3. Writing – A laser beam puts a lower charge on the drum where toner will stick to. 4. Developing – A cylinder puts toner onto the surface of the drum. The toner will stick to the cylinder because of a magnet inside the cylinder. 5. Transferring – Another electrical charge will take the toner off the drum onto the paper. 6. Fusing – Heat applied to the paper to permanently fuse text or images. As you can see Laser printers use a pretty lengthy process to produce text and images on paper. Inkjet printers on the other hand work by dispersing ink through a printer head that moves across the paper. If you are shopping for a new printer and really need high quality printing go with a laser printer. You may pay a little more, but Laser printers use toner which lasts longer than ink cartridges. Inkjet is good for the average user who may use their printer maybe 1-4 times a week printing documents and some lower quality pictures. Inkjet printers are very affordable and simple to maintain and operate.

Well that is it for this post….Hope you enjoyed J

Please remember to comment with any questions you may have.

Introduction to Networking

Welcome everyone to my blog. Today we will discuss the basic concept of what a network is as it applies to computers. A computer network is when one or more computers are connected virtually or physically together sharing common resources. Networks can be located in a room or span an entire city or in the case of the internet it can be global. The resources to be shared would be on a server and computers wanting to access these resources are called clients.

So what is the purpose of networks?

Networks can be constructed for communication such as email, instant messaging VoIP (phone calls) chat rooms.

Hardware can be shared among many computers via networks. When computers are interconnected resources can be shared.

Lastly software can be shared and used over a network.

To recap a network can be as small as two computers and as large as two million computers.

This is a basic introduction to what networks are and what they can do for us. In future posts I will go into more depth about networking, so until next time take care J

What is a web address?

Welcome everyone to my blog. Today we will discuss what a web address is and how it applies to everyday internet access. A web address or Internet address both terms used interchangeably is a unique address that allows you to locate a resource. For example the web address http://www.aol.com consists of http www AOL com. HTTP stands for something call Hyper Text Protocol which means that the page is accessible through web, but in most cases this is added automatically by your browser (i.e. Internet explorer, firefox). WWW is an acronym which stands for the World Wide Web. In conjunction with the HTTP portion of the address this means that the page is on the web. AOL is the name of the page or document that we are trying to access. Lastly the .com portion is what you call the domain. Every web page on the web is registered with either an .org .com .gov, etc. WWW.AOL.COM has a domain of .com or we can say AOL is registered as a .com address. Sometimes you will see a slash after a web address: www.aol.com/page1 this adds a new element to the previous address. The "/page" means that you are still on AOL.com, but you are just in a different section of www.aol.com the slash is a way to direct you to different sections of the current web page.

Well everyone take care for now and as always please comment or email me with any questions.

How CPU/Processor speed is measured

Good morning everyone and welcome to my blog. Today we will talk a little more in depth about how processor speed is measured. Before we begin let us review what the processor does.

The processor lives on the motherboard which is the backbone of the computer. The process or is responsible for carrying out instructions and executing them. Whenever we use the computer we are interfacing with the CPU by the way of our operating system. Anything that is done on the computer always makes some sort of contact with the CPU.

How fast a particular CPU can do this is measured by how fast it’s clock signal is. The clock signal keeps the time of how your cpu and other components work in yoru computer. The signal goes form a low to high state within a certain amount of time. Think of the clock signal as a metronome. The amount of instructions a processor can can perform during the clock signal is the speed of your processor .

This is a very basic explanation of how processors are measured. Other factors such as whether or not it runs in sync with clock and multipliers come into place, but for now just know that a processor’s speed is determined on how many instructions can be executed by a clock signal. Well take care for now and as always please feel free to comment or email me with any questions you may have.

ROM (Read only memory)

Welcome to my blog everyone. Today we will be discussing what ROM is as it pertains to your computer. Read only memory is exactly what it is for the most part. Rom Memory cannot be altered or changed, so we can say that it is not volatile memory. This means when power is not applied the contents are still stored. The function of ROM is to store information about the hardware of your computer and gives your computer instructions on how to actually start, otherwise known as booting. ROM exists in most electrical appliances and serves different purposes depending on the particular device. Well this is basically what ROM is, so I hope to see you again for my next posting where we will actually talk about what happens when your computer starts up.
Take care for now and please feel free to comment or email me.

Computer Terms

Welcome to my blog everyone. Today I would like to go over a few computer terms for everyone to look over. Every now and then I will take a break from regular computer and explain some terms that we will work with in future postings.

Hard Drive – A hard drive is a device designed to store data permanently. Storage capacity is usually measured in Gigabytes (Gb).

RAM – Ram is designed to hold data as well, but we call this type of storage volatile. This means when the computer turns off data is erased. Ram is only a temporary storage space to allow the computer to multitask-like how a big table would help you get things done. The more you have the better off you are.

Bit – The smallest measure of storage a computer can have.

Byte – 1000 Bits

MB – Equal to a 1000000 bytes

GB – Equal to a 1000000000 bytes

Optical Drive – Optical drives refer to CD, DVD, Bluray. This means that a laser is used to burn information on a blank disk.

Motherboard – The largest board in the computer which allows every device to connect to one another. It is the backbone of the computer

CPU – Central processing Unit – The brains of the computer. It’s job is send and receive instructions from devices and programs.

Thanks for visiting :) Remember please remember to ask questions or send emails with any questions you may have.