Hardware specifications

Hard drive

• The hard drive is what stores all your data. It houses the hard disk, where all your files and folders are physically located.

Hard drive capacity

• Your capacity requirement is derived from the size of your applications, but mostly the amount of data you need to store. Multimedia files such as graphics, animations and video take up considerably more space than text.

Speed

• A hard disk/drive unit comes with a set rotation speed varying from 4500 to 7200 rpm. Disk access time is measured in milliseconds

Clock speed

• Clock speed is the rate at which a processor can complete a processing cycle. It is typically measured in megahertz or gigahertz.

• One megahertz is equal to one million cycles per second, while one gigahertz equals one billion cycles per second. This means a 1.8 GHz processor has twice the clock speed of a 900 MHz processor.

Speed continued

• The speed of the hard drive contributes to the ability of a computer to run faster and access information in a more timely manner.

• If you want to know how fast your hard drive is, it is easy to find out using one of a few downloadable hard drive speed-testing programs.

Fire wire

• FireWire is a reliable well established transfer protocol which allows you to almost infinitely expand the possibilities of your computer by overcoming the space issues related with internal devices, and yet often beating the high data transfer from internal devices.

Firewire continued

• FireWire 400 can operated at up to 400Mb/s - that's transferring 400 megabits of data per second. FireWire 800 can transfer data at up to 900Mb/s

• With FireWire connectivity you can import movies on to your computer in minutes as opposed to hours from your digital camcorder, or straight on to your FireWire hard drive you don't even need the computer in some cases

• FireWire allows you to transfer data from your camera to the hard drive anywhere, it is the versatility which make the difference. You can even use FireWire to connect two computers together.

Bus

• A set of electronic signal pathways that allows information and signals to travel between components inside or outside of a computer.

Expansion Slot (connector) 

• The expansion bus, or external bus, is made up of the electronic pathways that connect the different external devices to the rest of your computer.

• These external devices (monitor, telephone line, printer, etc.) connect to ports on the back of the computer

• Those ports are actually part of a small circuit board or 'card' that fits into a connector on your motherboard inside the case.

• An opening in a computer where a circuit board can be inserted to add new capabilities to the computer. Nearly all personal computers except portables contain expansion slots for adding more memory, graphics capabilities, and support for special devices.

•  Half- and full-size. Half-size slots are also called 8-bit slots because they can transfer 8 bits at a time. Full-size slots are sometimes called 16-bit slots

Ports

• Physical network ports allow connecting cables to computers, routers, modems and other peripheral devices.

• Several different types of physical ports available on computer network hardware include:

• Ethernet ports• USB ports• serial ports