The computer tower to many people is just a magical, mysterious, heavy box which sits on the floor. You can plug things into the back, and push buttons on the front. Through the magic of computers, it just “works.” The system starts up, fancy colours appear on the monitor, cool sounds are heard on the speakers, you check your email, shutdown the computer, and go to bed. Is it magic?

Well, it’s far from magic; yet its also far from simple. Lets become acquainted with the different parts that are inside that heavy computer tower sitting on the floor. Today we will take a common sense approach in answering the question “What the heck is inside a computer?” We will start with the most important components first; that way if you fall asleep early, you will have retained something of significance

The most important part inside a computer is called the Motherboard. This is a flat, rectangular shaped circuit board which is mounted inside the computers’ Case. The case of course is the big heavy metal box itself. Nothing too exciting, so we will skip that. Back to the Motherboard. This circuit board is about 10 square inches in area. This is where your plug your keyboard, mouse, and USB devices such as printers into. The Motherboard physically connects all of the components together. In other words, all of the other parts inside the computer are connected together by the Motherboard. We will be talking about these other parts soon. You can actually think of the Motherboard as a series of high speed highways. These highways allow all of the components inside the computer to communicate. It is very important that the Motherboard is in good working order; else, components will not be able to “talk” to each other. When buying a computer, NEVER cheap out on the Motherboard; it’s the most important piece in the computer “puzzle.” Hopefully it will not seem so complicated after this article!

Next we have the Central Processing Unit which commonly goes by it’s acronym CPU. The CPU is a small computer chip about 1 square inch in area. It is latched and locked into the motherboard, allowing the CPU to communicate on the “Motherboard Highway.” And, this is for good reason! The CPU is the “brain” of the entire computer! It’’s overall importance is right up there with the motherboard. This small chip amazingly performs all of the calculations, computations, and digital manipulations that happen inside your computer! Of course, you never see this for yourself; it all happens in the background. All we get to see is the end result - colourful pictures, cool videos, and convenient email. The CPU speed is commonly measured in Clock Cycles. This is just a fancy term for something along the lines of “instructions per second.” In other words, the amount of data that the CPU can crunch in a given amount of time. You know when you’re looking to buy a computer from Future Shop, and the computer nerd starts rhyming off statistics measured in “Gigahertz” aka “Ghz”? This number is describing the speed of the CPU; The higher the number, the faster the computer. However, there are numerous things that contribute to the overall speed of a computer; CPU speed is not the holy grail. In fact, most computers sold today have multiple CPU’s inside one single physical chip! But before we get carried away, lets move onto the computers memory.

Random Access Memory is most famously known by its acronym RAM. RAM can be thought of as the computers short-term memory. Physically, it is just a small rectangular chip about 1 inch tall by 5 inches wide. It plugs directly into the motherboard. The CPU only has a limited amount of storage built into it, so it needs to hold things in the RAM for quick access. You see, the RAM inside your computer is very fast; must faster than your Hard Drive. The Hard Drive is a a small box about 1 inch tall by 4 inches wide by 5 inches long. You can think of the Hard Drive as long-term memory; this is where all of your data is stored after you turn off your system. All of your pictures, music, and documents are stored in this small box called the hard drive. This is connected to your Motherboard by a cable. When the computer needs something, it first loads the data from the hard drive into the RAM. Then from the RAM, it goes into the CPU. As we said earlier, the RAM is much faster than the Hard Drive.

Cool Experiment
Shut down your computer.
Turn on your computer.
Run your favourite program, and take note roughly how many seconds it takes to load.
Close that program.
Run the same program again, and count the seconds again.

Conclusion?
The program should load faster the second time around. The first time was slower because the computer had to fetch the program from the “slow” Hard Drive and load it into the RAM. The second time was quicker because the computer did not have to access the hard drive. This is because the program was still sitting in the RAM (short term memory) from the first time it was loaded. Cool huh?

So the bottom line here is this - The bigger the Hard Drive, the more storage capacity you have for things like pictures, music, and documents. The more RAM you have, the faster programs will load up in your machine. Both kinds of memory are measured in “Gigabytes” aka “GB.” The more the merrier.

Last but not least, is the CD / DVD Drive. This drive makes it convenient to swap data in and out of your computer. It connects to the motherboard with a cable. Just pop in a disc, and you will be able to see what’s on the disc. Whether it be pictures, music, movies, or anything else. You are able to copy any of these things into the computer. In the other direction, you may copy things from the computer onto the disc. However, you can only do this if your drive is capable of writing aka “burning.” When you are finished writing, simply take the disc out and you are on your way. Basically it is a convenient way to take information with you on the go.

These 5 components make up the foundation of a basic computer. Of course there are endless additions you can make, numerous upgrades available, and a million other gadgets you can buy for the computer. Nevertheless, it all comes down to the 5 basic components listed above. Now you can tell your kids what the heck is inside your computer. But be warned - they might teach you a thing or two. It could be an episode of the teacher becoming the student…

This entry was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 9:07 pm and is filed under Computer Hardware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.