Moving from a hard drive to an SSD is a fairly straightforward procedure that you can perform in less than an hour. Here, we’ll cover the steps you’ll need to take in order to install an SSD in a desktop PC. [Read more…] about How To Install An SSD

eSATA. The external SATA interface has been around longer than most of the ports we just described. Until USB 3.0 came along, this port was the fastest link to consumer storage peripherals such as external hard drives. [Read more…] about What is eSATA?

HDMI. The High-Definition Multimedia Interface has been around since the early 2000s, and was developed for consumer electronics devices such as Blu-ray Disc players and HDTVs. However, HDMI has also seen wide use in graphics cards and computer displays. Its connector’s wide rectangle with two beveled corners can be adapted to DVI. [Read more…] about What is HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface)?

Thunderbolt. The Thunderbolt standard (formerly called Light Peak) is aimed at being able to use a single interface for multiple device connections. Thunderbolt is a 10Gbps (1.25GBps) interface that combines PCI-E (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) with Display Port in a single, thin cable. It can daisy-chain compatible devices, and it supports hubs, which lets you use a single cable connection to link your computer to a mouse, keyboard, monitor, and external storage drive. Even data from an external RAID (redundant array of independent drives) array of SSDs wouldn’t hit a bottleneck on its way to your computer, thanks to Thunderbolt. [Read more…] about What is Thunderbolt?

Display Port is a super-fast, 21.6Gbps interface designed to carry video to computer monitors. With this much bandwidth on tap, it’s able to accommodate greater resolution, faster refresh rates, and more color depth than HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface). Besides professional media content generation applications, Display Port (sometimes abbreviated DP) is ideal for multiple-monitor setups. [Read more…] about What is DisplayPort?

The video card, as its name indicates is the component the computer whose role is to transmit data on the screen in the control of a microprocessor dedicated and integrated into the card. It is this microprocessor that calculates the position of points on the screen and processes the texture of restitution algorithms for display complex images such as those generated by video games. [Read more…] about What is Video Card?

A Browser is a piece of software that everybody needs if they want to surf the Internet for useful or interesting websites. Web pages are designed to be read by Browsers and Browsers are designed to read web pages. Fortunately, acquiring a Browser is slightly easier than catching the common cold. They are everywhere. Most computers now come with one pre-installed. A great many CD-ROMs are now designed to be read like a website and so include a Browser which can be installed onto a computer’s hard drive and ISPs give them away free to anyone who signs up for their service. There is nothing difficult about acquiring a Browser. [Read more…] about What is Browsers?

Essentially these are extra programs that can be installed and used as part of a Browser i.e. they plug into it. Typically these would provide extra facilities like the ability to handle sound files or advanced graphics. What this means in practice is that, should a web page incorporate sound as well as text, the relevant plug-in will be needed before it can be read by any Browser and the sound played through the computer’s own speakers. [Read more…] about What is Plug-Ins?

In American homes, or so the story goes, when visitors arrive they are given a cookie which in Britain would be a biscuit. This philosophy has now been extended to the Internet. Whenever a visitor, better known as a Browser, arrives at certain sites a cookie is sent down the line and saves itself to the local computer’s hard disk. [Read more…] about What is Cookies?

As all search engines are different they all operate in slightly different ways. The good news is that the same search techniques can be applied to them all, but, as might be expected, each one is a variation around the same theme. To make it even worse not all search engines actually search the Internet, some are what is known as web directories. Then, just to confuse the picture even more some engines do keyword searches while others are concept based. [Read more…] about What is Search Engines?

Of all these error codes by far the most common is 404 which is also one of the few that can be worked around – always assuming the website has not simply ceased to exist. Everything else can be fixed although it would help to explain the difference between web names as they appear in the press and as they appear in a Browser. [Read more…] about What is Error Code 404?

Derived from Users Network this is, again, totally separate from the WWW. Briefly, the Internet is also home to what are called news groups which are broadly divided into several categories and which cater for every topic imaginable. [Read more…] about What is USENET?

“AirDrop” is a very handy feature and easy to use for wireless file transfer between Mac, even outside the context of a home network. AirDrop arrived on the iPad and iPhone with iOS 7 and on Mac with Mac OS X Lion. Indeed not need a router or even connect to an existing Wi-Fi or Bluetooth network to use “AirDrop”. There is nothing to set up, all you need is a recent Mac (“AirDrop” indeed requires a recent Mac to be activated) and communication will be made directly between Wi-Fi cards Mac (ad-hoc mode). [Read more…] about What is AirDrop?

To understand what de-fragmentation IS, a person must first understand how data files are saved onto magnetic storage disks. Whether on a floppy disk or a hard disk, data is stored in a certain format. Formatting consists of dividing a disk into organized sections so that data can be located by the computer. Formatting organizes disks into concentric rings called tracks. Tracks are divided into sectors (pie shaped wedges) in which files and parts of files are stored. [Read more…] about What is Defragmentation?

(Multiple-instruction multiple-data) A generic description that can be applied to any MULTIPROCESSOR computer architecture in which each processor is able to execute a different program, as distinct from a SIMD architecture in which each processor executes the same program on a different data item. With MIMD architecture, the deployment of the program code onto the different processors and the interconnection TOPOLOGY of the processors become visible to the programmer, and complicate the writing of programs.

(Dual In-line Memory Module) A small PRINTED CIRCUIT BOARD with RAM chips mounted on both sides and a single edge connector, via which it can be plugged into a computer MOTHER BORD. DIMM differs from a SIMM in that the chips on either side have separate pins on the edge connector, permitting a wider 128-bit data path for faster access to the memory; hence they tend to be used in more expensive systems like servers.

A trackball is an alternative to a mouse or a stylus. It looks kind of like a mouse upside-down, and you use it by rolling the ball around with your fingers. It has one or more buttons to click, just like a mouse. [Read more…] about What is Trackball?

SIMM stands for single inline memory module. Before you try to understand what a SIMM is, you should read and understand RAM and memory. [Read more…] about What is SIMM (single inline memory module)?

A serial port is the socket (also known as an “input/output connector”) where you plug in the cables to attach to a serial device, such as a printer or modem. [Read more…] about What is Serial port?

A disk has two sides (a top and a bottom). Each side of the disk has tracks (concentric rings) on the surface. Each ring is divided into arc-shaped sectors, little units of storage space on the disk, usually 512 bytes on a floppy disk and up to several thousand bytes on a hard disk. Whatever the size, a sector is the smallest unit the computer can read or write at a time; it cannot deal with portions of a sector. [Read more…] about What is Disk Sector?

SCSI (pronounced “scuzzy,” not “sexy”) stands for small computer systems interface. SCSI is a standard for interfacing, or connecting, personal computers to peripheral devices (like scanners, hard disks, or CD-ROM players) and having them send information to each other. [Read more…] about What is SCSI (Small Computer Systems Interface)?

A scanner is a device that takes a picture of an image that exists outside the computer, such as a photograph or a drawing on paper. As the scanner takes the picture, it digitizes the image (breaks it up into dots that can be recreated on the computer screen with electronic signals), and send this digital information to the computer as a file. Then you can take this file of the scanned image and use it in your work. [Read more…] about What is Scanner?

These spoonfuls of alphabet-number soup designate different standards for connecting serial devices (like modems, mice, and printers) to the computer by plugging their cables into serial ports. Through a serial port, the computer exchanges information with the device back and forth “serially,” or one bit at a time. [Read more…] about What is RS-232, RS-232-C, RS-422, RS-423, RS-449?

A plotter is a graphics printer that literally uses ink pens to draw the images. The pens move around on the surface of the paper like something out of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Plotters can only draw data in vector graphics format, graphics that are made of straight lines (the curved forms are actually drawn with many tiny straight lines). There are flatbed plotters where the pen moves across the page in the x and y axes. [Read more…] about What is Plotter?

PCL, short for printer command language, consists of a large set of commands for controlling the Hewlett-Packard Laser Jet and DeskJet families of printers, and compatible printers from other manufacturers. PCL commands are used to tell the printer where to place text or graphics on the page, which font to print, whether to print bold, italic or underlined text, and so on. [Read more…] about What PCL (printer command language)?

You have probably heard of printer ports and modem ports and perhaps ADB ports or some other kind of port. A port is a plug, or receptacle (known in other computer dictionaries as an input/output connector). Once you insert one end of a cable into a port, information can flow between your computer and whatever device is attached to the other end of the cable. [Read more…] about What is Parallel port?

A CD, such as the kind you play to listen to music, is an example of an optical disc. So is a “video disc” (properly called a laser disk), such as the kind you can rent at the video store that has an entire movie on it. Optical discs for your computer can hold an incredible amount of information- up to 6,000 megabytes (which is 6 gigabytes) of data. Entire encyclopaedia, Shakespeare’s works, or representations of the art in the Louvre have been recorded onto optical discs. [Read more…] about What is Optical Disc?