The Hardware in a Computer

The hardware in the computer is the physical components that contain the instructions from software and run it (computer’s monitor, hard drive, keyboard etc). Those parts are monitors, hard drives, keyboards and so many others.

The hardware that is incorporated into a computer has both good and bad sides, which might be cost, obsolescence and security problems. What’s more, such hardware is very hard to diagnose and fix without having specialized knowledge and skills.

RAM
RAM buffers temporary data the CPU needs at a moment’s notice; otherwise, CPUs would constantly need to visit slower storage devices such as hard drives or solid state disks to locate and execute information.

The memory in your computer is nonvolatile (meaning that it will be empty after the switch is turned off). Depending on the configuration, RAM might be spliced into the logic board of your computer, or you may have it packaged in expandable modules called DIMMs that plug into slots on your motherboard.

Computer RAM cells occupy a memory cell with the electric charge of data bits. These are the two most commonly used kinds of computer RAM: SRAM (flip-flop circuits that store each bit) is faster and uses less dynamic power than DRAM (lower capacity); SDRAM allocates memory based on the microprocessor’s clock speed which results in reduced delays and higher transfer rates.

Hard Drive
Hard Disk Drives are non-volatile data storage. They also contain user files, images, videos and songs that you have accessed or saved as you downloaded them from websites or social networks. There are various storage sizes and capacities available for any type of storage requirement and replacements can easily be replaced.

Hard drives are electromechanical pieces containing one or more hard, fast rotating disks, covered in magnetic material, that are attached to moving platters with magnetic heads mounted on an actuator arm which reads and writes digital information to the disk’s surface, via software at the system board and CPU.

Each platter is divided into sectors containing thousands of sub-divisions which take an electrical charge in a binary one or zero number, also called sub-divisions which accept binary ones or zeros. The sector structure was identical to the first one applied on an IBM fridge-size hard drive in 1956 – longitudinal recording allowed sectors to be arranged together on the platters later.

Motherboard
Motherboard : This is the hub of any computer, from which information is fed into other devices. It communicates between these objects via data buses by sending binary bits (ones and zeroes). In addition, the motherboard process information from its central processing unit (CPU), memory, etc.

This is the module that contains the BIOS or UEFI chip that initializes hardware at startup and transfers data between operating system and peripherals like mice and keyboards.

Motherboards also have expansion slots for other components like sound cards, video cards, network cards and hard disk drives. Additionally, random access memory (RAM) is a temporary data store that your computer uses to run programs and do things more efficiently. And also motherboards are the backbone of computers, since they’re used to hold on to the rest of the components.

Keyboard
Keyboards are mechanical keyboards, whose purpose is to type in text, characters and instructions on a computer. They can be actual on the desktop computers or virtual in the tablet computers and consist of letters and numbers with alphanumeric keys, for pointing and pressing all the letters and numbers, and function keys (Shift>, Ctrl>, Alt> etc) for indicating software commands.

Every key you press shuts a circuit, lets current flow through a tiny chip inside your keyboard, and outputs its “key code” directly to the processor of your main computer.

This information is translated by the BIOS into binary code that the CPU can interpret and it is also decoded to eliminate redundant bits that would lead to multiple keystrokes for one letter (called “debounce”) that would lead to multiple keystrokes for that letter (called debounce). When it gets analyzed by application programs (eg Microsoft Word), its output data shows up on the screen.

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