A+ Certification : 3.0 Understanding Laptops And Portable Devices (Essentials)

USB is used most often in laptops as an expansion bus for external peripherals. Although parallel and PS/2 allow for connection of external peripherals, they are not as flexible or widely used for expansion as USB.

The touchpad is a mousing surface built into the laptop. It allows you to use your finger to control the mouse pointer by drawing on the surface.

The processor can adjust how fast it's working, called throttling, to save system power.

It has to be a problem with the LCD display. If it were the video card, then the display would appear warped and fuzzy on the external monitor as well. While many motherboards contain video circuitry, this answer is not specific enough. If the video driver were corrupt, you would have the same problem on all displays.

Laptop LCD video displays can scratch easily. To clean them, it's best to use a cleaner designed specifically for LCD screens. They can be found at any office supply store.

The IEEE standard for 11Mbps wireless transmission over 2.4GHz radio is the 802.11b standard. The 802.11g standard has a maximum transmission speed of 54Mbps.

The tablet PC is a notebook with a flip-around screen that allows user to hold it like a large notebook and write notes directly on the screen with special stylus.

A Type II PC Card is the type used most often for expansion devices like NICs, sound cards, SCSI controllers, modems, and so on.

Active matrix screens have better performance than passive-matrix screens. There are no dual- or quad-matrix display devices.

The SoDIMM and MicroDIMM are the common laptop memory standards. Of the two, MicroDIMM is smaller

A DC adapter converts the DC output form a car or airplane accessory power plug into the voltages required by your laptop.

By and large, compromises always must be made when comparing laptops to desktops. Although laptops can be used as desktop replacements, their performance is almost always lower than comparably priced desktop

BIOS-ACPI is the power management standard introduced in 1996. It's an extension of the system BIOS that is responsible for managing power to devices in your system.

Before removing hardware, you should stop the device using the Safely Remove Hardware icon located in your system tray. Turing off the laptop would work, but it's not necessary. After stopping the device, you can use the latch (if your laptop has one) to release the drive.

The WUXGA standard is the only widescreen standard listed, and it is the only one that supports 1900 x 1200 resolution at a 16:10 aspect ratio.

For ACPI power management to work, it first must be a feature of the BIOS, In addition, the motherboard and processor must support the standard. Finally, you need Windows 98 or newer.

The Touchpoint (aka finger mouse) was releasedx with the IBM ThinkPad serious of laptops.

The PC Card architecture has two components. The first is the Socket Services software, and the second is the Card Services software.

Two helpful things to try are toggling the video output function key (usually Fn+F8) and plugging an external monitor into the laptop. Removing the display is possible but not recommended. Powering the system off and back on isn't likely to correct the problem.