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A Guide On The Main Components In a PC
the surface of the floppy disk.
A floppy disk can be useful for backing up single copies of a certain file or two but it is not recommended, nor is it practical to use it for much more as file sizes keep growing the floppy disk will continue to become more and more obsolete. This statement goes with what Joe Kraynak says: 'With the increased popularity of the Internet and email, people are relying less and less on floppy disks to exchange files.'
CD-ROM/DVD-ROM Drive
The CD-ROM and the DVD-ROM drives are very popular methods of data storage. It is essential for almost all computers nowadays to have access to a CD-ROM drive in the very least, especially at a business level. They work in a very similar way to the hard disk and floppy disk drives in the sense that they are read and written to, however this job is done with a laser and the term for writing to a CD or DVD is often referred to as 'burning'. DVD-ROM's work in exactly the same way, the only difference being that DVD-ROM's contain a lot more data.
A CD-ROM is almost essential according to Ian Sinclair 'If you want to make use of multimedia programs, in which text, sound and graphics are all used.' A DVD-ROM I would say would only be functional in a system if you wished to either playback a DVD multimedia sequence of if the company had an enormous amount of data to back up that would exceed 650MB or so.
Expansion Cards
Expansion cards are the cards inside of the PC that, plainly speaking give it new features. Things like internal modems and graphics cards fall under the title of Expansion Cards. Expansion cards are useful for performing specific features for a computer, the modem takes care of speaking to an analogue line for the computer and acts as a translator for the computer and the phone line. A graphics card allows you to deal with high quality media the likes of which you would have previously either had trouble with or had it not work at all.
Expansion cards are paramount for fine-tuning the system. They are the parts of the machine that make it truly customisable, an expert may even be able to take the specifications of your expansion cards and make an estimated guess at what the system is mostly used for! That is of course depending on whether or not the person whom specified the machines fine tuned them as well as they should have.
Power Supply
The power supply, as the name suggests supply's power to the whole system. This is the part of the computer that is hooked directly into the mains. One quick fact about power supplies is that, due to the capacitors and other electronics inside of them they are normally very dangerous even when disconnected from the mains, they are almost completely non user-serviceable and quite a lot of suppliers would probably recommend that you buy a new power supply should it become faulty. [next page]