What is the difference between Hardware and Software?

Hardware and software are the two main parts of the computer. To differentiate between hardware and software, you will need to think of hardware as every tangible part of the computer that can be touched, felt, handled, and also think of software as programs or encoded program instructions that cannot be physically touched or handled.

These programs that make up the software of a computer system are modifiable. In contrast, every tangible part of a computer is fixed and cannot be changed without any physical modification or replacement. To understand this better, examples of hardware are the motherboard, expansion cards, keyboards, CPU, printers, floppies, disks, etc.

Examples of software are web browsers, antimalware, system operating system. At times, hardware and software can be mistaken because they come together. For example, when you purchase an antimalware, you will be given a disk which is the hardware, while the programs in it are the software.

Computers are apart of everyday lives, for they are used for both work and school. Two primary things that make up the system of the computer are hardware and software. Hardware are physical parts of the computer that can be seen and felt. These include the mouse, keyboard, wires, screen, and ports.

Software are parts of the computer that can not be seen or felt, but they help a computer run. This includes the operating system, browsers that the user can use to surf the web, and the memory of the computer. The hardware is home to the software that the computer has.

A typical computer system is made up of hardware and software without any other thing. The hardware components of a computer are those parts you can physically see and touch. Examples include: the monitor, CPU box, mouse, disks, keyboard, chips, floppies, pen drives, screens, printers, wires, USB ports, and etc.

The software components, on the contrary, refer to those computer components or program related that you cannot see with your physical eyes or sense physically, but they are like the breath that gives life a computer.

Examples of software include the system or computer operating system, the web browsers, antivirus programs, the memory, reports, data and etc. The hardware components are the devices that house the software. Those storage devices that keep data and store it in an electronic format are the hardware, while the data being stored are the software. We have two kinds of software, which are the system software and the application software.