The PC (PCMCIA) Card
The PC card, technically called the PCMCIA Card is a form factor of a peripheral interface designed for laptop computers. It was originally designed for computer memory expansion. More ...
Building Your Own PC! - The Motherboard is the Core of the PC
The single most important piece of hardware that you will buy is the motherboard - the very core of your PC. If you buy a PC from a shop, chances are you'll never think about or even see the motherboard; but when you build a system from scratch, it must be your primary consideration. Everything else follows from here. More ...
MPEG4, H.264, MJPEG Compression for DVR Recording - What's the Difference?
The main objective of Video compression is to have the smallest file size possible while still preserving good video and audio quality. MPEG4, H.264, and MJPEG are three DVR CODECs that aim to compress the videos for transferring purposes. Each of these formats have their own strengths and weaknesses. More ...
Build Your Own Computer
Before you begin make sure you have all the tools you need and a clean space to work. Make sure you have all required tools and materials. Unpack the materials once package at a time and inspect them to make sure they are not broke or defective. More ...
Why Does My Hard Drive Show Less Space Than the Specification?
Your hard drive may show less space than the published specifications due to a number of reasons. 1. The way size is calculated and displayed. Some computers have a non-DOS hard drive partition that is used for features such as Hibernation, or Recovery. More ...
VIA Chipsets
Via was founded in 1997. Via introduced the VP1 chipset to compete with Intel's 430 series. The VP1 offered support for EDO, BEDO and SDRAM as well as UltraDMA ahead of Intel. Today Via is one of the worlds largest chipset manufacturers. More ...
Understanding Your Motherboard
Understanding your motherboard is about pointing out what the bits of your motherboard actually do, if you are not used to building or upgrading your own machine you will want to know the ins and outs of the motherboard. More ...
Understanding Your PC's CPU Clock Speed and Front Side Bus
The CPU or Central Processing Unit is the brains of any computer and the two major manufacturers are Intel and AMD or Advanced Micro Devices. For many years Intel CPUs were found in nearly all PCs. And now the Intel is found in most systems but the newer Athlon class CPU from AMD have taken a large chunk of the CPU market. More ...
Anatomy of a Liquid Crystal Display (LCD)
Color LCD displays have a sandwich-like structure. One layer of the sandwich has liquid crystal between two glass plates. One glass plate has a matrix of thin film transistors on it. Liquid crystals move depending upon the charge applied to a tiny capacitor by its related transistor. More ...
Power Supply Form Factors
The shape and physical layout of a power supply is called its 'form factor'. Power supplies come in several industry standard form factors. Power supplies with the same form factor are physically interchangeable. More ...
The RS-232 Serial Port
The RS-232 serial port was used to connect a mouse, modem, and/or printer. The RS-232 serial port is now totally obsolete. I would be very surprised if you ever run into a PC with an RS-232 serial port except possibly in a third-world country. However, I'll briefly describe the it in this article because you may run into a question about it in the CompTIA A+ Certification Exam. More ...
SDRAM Types: DDR, DDR2, DDR3, DDR4
With computer memory modules, DDR stands for Double Data Rate because it performs two transfers per clock cycle, the number after DDR specifies other characteristics like latency, speed, and voltage. More ...
Digital Video Interface (DVI)
Today's computers use LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) displays. LCDs are a digital device. It makes little sense to convert the digital image data to analog just to convert it back to digital to display on the LCD. To avoid this double conversion, the DVI (Digital Video Interface) standard was developed. More ...
Understanding PC Data Buses
Physically, a data bus is the connection between the CPU and other devices on the PCs motherboard. A data connection can be serial or parallel. The data bus used in first-generation PCs used 8-bit architecture. PCI Express uses switched serial connections. More ...
