A+ Certification : 1.0 Identifying PC Components (Essentials)

The spine of the computer is the system board, otherwise known as the motherboard.

Although all motherboard design styles listed are in use today, the ATX motherboard style (and its derivatives) is the most popular design.

DDR SDRAM is manufactured on a DIMM. DIP's are the original chips that memory was delivered in. The SIMM is the predecessor to the DIMM, on which DDR was never deployed. RIMM is the Rambus proprietary competitor for the DIMM that carries RDRAM instead of SDRAM.

The DVD-ROM can store many types of data as well as movies. In the computer world, data can be audio files, Word documents, digital photos, and many other things.

A cathode-ray tube, or CRT, is the technology used in the original televisions and computer monitors.

A hard drive stores data on a magnetic medium, which does not lose its information after the power is removed, and which can be repeatedly written to and erased.

USBs are used to connect multiple peripherals to one computer through a single port. They support data transfer rates as high as 1.5MBps (for UBS 1.0, which is the option listed)

Although technically PCI and ISA could be used for video adapters, AGP was specifically designed for the use of high-speed, 3D graphics video cards.

A common PC's power supply produces five voltages: +3.3VDC, +5VDC, -5VDC, +12VDC, and -12VDC. These voltages are necessary to power different components of the computer, such as the motherboard, hard drive, and peripherals. The +3.3VDC and +5VDC are used for low-power components, while the +12VDC is used for high-power components like the CPU and graphics card. The -5VDC and -12VDC are less commonly used, but still necessary for certain legacy devices.

The Socket A motherboard socket is used primarily with AMD processors, including the Athlon XP.

The 1394 standard provides for greater data transfer speeds and the ability to send memory addresses as well as data through a serial port.

The USB 2.0 spec provides for a maximum speed of 480 megabits per second (Mbps-not megabytes per second, or MBps)

A PS/2 port is also known as a mini-DIN 6 connector.

Although these drives and the interfaces have become known as IDE and EIDE, the official name for the technology is ATA.

Most Pentium 4 chips use the Socket 478 motherboard CPU socket.

The unique thing about the Pentium II is that is uses a Single Edge Connector (SEC) to attach to the motherboard instead of the standard PGA package.

The NLX form factor places expansion slots on a special riser card and is used in low-profile PCs.

The spine of the computer is the system board, otherwise known as the motherboard and less commonly referred to as the planar board.

Bidirectional parallel ports can both transmit and receive data. An ECP was designed to transfer data at high speeds. EPP parallel ports provide for greater transfer speeds and the ability to send memory addresses as well as data through a parallel port. The standard parallel port only transmit data out of the computer. It cannot receive data.