Hardware and Software

Done by: Chelsea Bryan Friday, October 10,2014

The BIOS (aka) Basic input/output system, is a built in software

that determines what's a computer can do without accessing programs from a disk. The BIOS contains all code required to control the keyboard, display screen, disk drives, serial communications and a number of miscellaneous functions. The BIOS is typically placed in a ROM chip that comes with the computer. This ensures that the BIOS will always be available and will not be damaged by disk failures. It also makes it possible for a computer to boot itself. Ram is faster then ROM, many computer manufacturers design systems so that the BIOS is copied from ROM to RAM each time the computer is booted. This is known as shadowing. Many modern PCs have a flsh BIOS, which means that the BIOS has been recorded on a flash memory chip, which can be updated if necessary.

BIOS

BIOS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FhxqEZqY5c - Video

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS - Link

http://www.dmtf.org/documents/smbios/system-management-bios-reference-specification-230 - Reference

A sound card is an internal computer expansion card that

facilitates economical input and output of audio signals to and from a computer under control of computer programs. Sound cards is also applied to external audio interfaces that use software to generate sound, as opposed to using hardware inside the PC. Typical uses of sound cards include providing the audio component for multimedia applications such as music composition editing video or audio presentation education and entertainment games and video projection. Sound functionality can also be integrated onto the motherboard, using basically the same components as a plug in card. The best plug in cards which use better and more expensive components, can achieve higher quality then integrated sound. The integrated sound system is often still referred to as a sound card.

Sound card

Sound card

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_card - link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp4TDe814WU – video

http://www.dxzone.com/catalog/Technical_Reference/Sound_Card_Radio_Interfacing/ - reference

A video card ( also called a video adapter,

display card, graphics card, graphics board etc) is to emphasize the distinction between this implementation and is a expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display, such as a computer monitor.

Video card

Video card

http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/what-is-a-video-card-function-definition-types.html#lesson - videohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_card - link

A hard disk drive is a data storage device

used for storing and retrieving digital information using rapidly rotating disks coated with a magentic material. An HDD retains its data even if the power goes out. Data is read in a random access manner, which means that individual blocks of data can be stored or retrieved in any order other then the sequentially.

Hard Disk Drive

HDD

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive - link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdmLvl1n82U – video