INTRO TO PC

• Electrostatic discharge can occur when there is a buildup of an electric charge that exists on a surface which comes into contact with another differently charged surface.
• At least 3,000 volts of static electricity must build up before a person can feel ESD.
• The case houses the internal components such as the power supply, motherboard, central processing unit (CPU), memory, disk drives, and assorted adapter cards.
• The term form factor refers to the physical design and look of a case.
• Computers use a power supply to convert AC power into a lower voltage DC power required by internal components.
• Advanced Technology – original power supply for legacy computer systems.
• AT Extended – updated version of the AT
• ATX12V – the most common power supply on the market today
• EPS12V – originally designed for network servers but is now commonly used in high-end desktop models.
• Connectors - used to power various internal components, such as the motherboard and disk drives.
• 20-pin or 24-pin slotted connector - the main power connector that connects the power supply (PSU) to the motherboard. It supplies power to the CPU, memory, chipset, and other onboard devices.
• SATA keyed connector - used to connect storage devices like hard drives and solid-state drives (SSDs) to a computer's motherboard.
• Molex keyed connector - used for providing power to the motherboard, fans, floppy disk drive, CD/DVD drive, video card, some older hard drive models, and more.
• Berg keyed connector - used in connections for turbo switches, front panel lights, jumpers for motherboard configuration and reset button to the motherboard of the computer.
• 4-pin to 8-pin auxiliary power connector - supplies additional power or current to the motherboard.
• 6/8-pin PCIe power connector - used to provide supplemental power to video cards.
• A rail is the printed circuit board (PCB) inside the power supply to which the external cables are connected.
• The 3.3 volt and 5 volt supplies are typically used by digital circuits, while the 12 volt supply is used to run motors in disk drives and fans.
• The motherboard is the backbone of the computer. It is a printed circuit board (PCB) that contains buses, or electrical pathways, that interconnect electronic components.
• Motherboard is a printed circuit board that contains buses, or electrical pathways, that interconnect electronic components.
• 1st Generation computers were huge and used vacuum tubes to control electric prone and were prone to wearing out.
• 2nd Generation computers started using transistors to old vacuum tubes which enabled smaller and more reliable computer devices.
• Some modern transistors are around 14 nanometers across.
• Chipset consists of the integrated circuits on the motherboard that control how system hardware interacts with the CPU and motherboard. 
• Northbridge (chipset) - controls high speed access to the RAM and video card
• Southbridge (chipset) - allows the CPU to communicate with slower speed devices, including hard drives, universal serial bus ports, and expansion slots.
• ENUMERATE THREE COMON MOTHERBOARD FORM FACTORS

  1. Advanced Technology Extended
  2. Micro-ATX
  3. ITX
• Micro-ATX - designed to fit in smaller and more compact cases, and they are more energy-efficient and less noisy than ATX motherboards
• Advanced Technology Extended - provides a number of peripheral power connectors and (in modern systems) two connectors for the motherboard
• The central processing unit is responsible for interpreting and executing commands.
• The CPU is a small microchip that resides within a CPU package.
• The CPU socket is the connection between the motherboard and the processor.
• Pin Grid Array - the pins are on the underside of the processor package and is inserted into the motherboard CPU socket.
• Land Grid Array - the pins are in the socket instead of on the processor.
• A case fan is considered as active cooling.
• Random Access Memory is the temporary working storage for data and programs that are being accessed by the CPU; this is a volatile memory.
• Read-only memory is a type of computer storage containing non-volatile, permanent data that, normally, can only be read, not written to.
• TYPES OF READ-ONLY MEMORY

  1. ROM chips
  2. PROM chips
  3. EPROM chips
  4. EEPROM chips
• PROM chips - a type of memory chip that can be programmed with data only once
• EPROM chips - memory that does not lose its data when the power supply is cut off; a type of programmable read-only memory (PROM) chip that retains its data when its power supply is switched off