Computer Times
For the Beginner
Understanding Your Computer
This month's article is for beginners who want to know more about personal computers. As we review the various parts and pieces, you will find that the computer is really quite easy to understand.
At first glance, the computer may appear to be a mysterious box, filled with complex circuit cards and cables. But if we break it down logically, the computer is not very complicated at all. Now, I'm not talking about the circuits and operating system that take a rocket scientist to understand, I'm talking about the basic operations of a computer. Let's review the basics.
When you look at the computer, you see a keyboard, a monitor, and a case. The keyboard may look a little frightening at first, with all the specially marked keys, but let's follow its evolution. The first keyboards looked just like a typewriter keyboard, with only one extra button to send information to the computer. When the keyboard began to be used on personal computers, around the year 1982, users began to demand more keys. Accountants wanted a 10-key number pad (found at the far right of today's keyboards), and game players wanted arrow buttons to direct their games (found imbedded in the number pad, and repeated again between the number pad and the letter keys for the users who want quick access to both numbers and arrow keys.) Users also began to demand special keys to do things like bold a word, italicize a sentence,
center a sentence,
and so on. Thus, the Control key was born (Ctrl on most keyboards.) By pressing this at the same time you press another key, you could easily do things like bold (Ctrl + B), italicize (Ctrl + I),
center (Ctrl + C),
etc. Soon, though, we ran out of key combinations and had to add an alternative control key, labeled the Alt key. When key combinations became a little confusing, users began to demand single keys to do specific functions, like bringing up "Help" information. Thus, the function keys were born (found at the top of the keyboard as F1, F2, etc.). Finally, we have the "Escape" (Esc) key (top left of keyboard) to help us escape from silly errors; the Delete and Insert keys (between the number pad and character keys) to insert and delete text; Home, End, Page Up/Down keys to quickly move through documents; and a few keys seldom used by anyone, like Scroll Lock, Pause, and Print Screen (which will NOT print your screen in most Windows situations.)
The monitor is similar to your television. It has an on/off button, usually vertical/horizontal adjustments, contrast and brightness knobs, and image controls. It's pretty simple to operate.
Finally, we have the computer case. The first thing you will notice is a slot in the front. This is used for diskettes, which record and save information, much like a tape recorder's cassette tape is used to record and save songs. You may also have a CD-ROM drive, which is so similar to your CD player that it can also play your audio CD's.
Inside the box are two fairly important items, the hard disk and the memory. The hard disk, like the diskette, is used to record and save information, but it is on a hard platter, rather than a floppy platter like the diskette. The memory refers to several little computer chips with millions of tiny switches, used as the work area for the computer.
Let's use a standard office desk for an analogy. The computer's hard disk is equivalent to the desk drawers, which can store hundreds of files. The computer's memory is equivalent to the top of the desk, where you can only work on a few files at a time. Both hard disks and memory are measured in bytes (equivalent to a character). A kilobyte (KB) is roughly a thousand characters; a megabyte (MB) is roughly a million characters; a gigabyte (GB) is roughly a billion characters. The more bytes available on your hard disk, the more files you can store. The more bytes available in memory, the more things you can work on at one time.
When buying a new computer, it is always a good rule to get as much memory and as large a hard drive as you can practically afford. You cannot buy too much memory or too large a hard drive. The more memory you have, the more things you can do at one time, and the faster your programs will run. The larger your hard drive, the more programs and information you can store. Just like you always seem to need a larger desk to hold all the things you are working on, and larger desk drawers to store all the things you want to store, you will always want more computer memory and hard drive space. You will never feel that you have too much memory to work on all the programs you want to use or that you have enough hard drive space to store all the programs, pictures, movies, sound clips, and documents you want to store.
As digital cameras and scanners have become very affordable, many beginners have decided to move from standard photos to digital photos. Digital cameras can take an unlimited number of photos with no additional processing expense. You simply take the photos, download them to your hard disk, erase them from the digital camera and take some more. Or, you can convert your traditional photos to digital photos by scanning them into your computer. Once you have digital photos in your computer, you can crop them, change colors, and change the contrast and brightness to get them practically perfect before you print them on your color printer. The only drawback to all of this is the amount of hard drive space that can be easily consumed by an avid photographer. This is just one example of why you need to get the biggest hard disk you can afford.
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Till next month...
Happy Computing! J