PC Repair Hardware Revision 2

A chipset is usually designed to work with a specific family of microprocessors. Because it controls communications between the processor and external devices, the chipset plays a crucial role in determining system performance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipset

Motherboards are subcategorized by the type of processor socket they have. The processor socket (also called a CPU socket) is the connector on the motherboard that houses a CPU and forms the electrical interface and contact with the CPU. Processor sockets use a pin grid array (PGA) where pins on the underside of the processor connect to holes in the processor socket. Computers based on the Intel x86 architecture include socket processors.

A CPU cache is a cache used by the central processing unit of a computer to reduce the average time to access memory. The cache is a smaller, faster memory which stores copies of the data from the most frequently used main memory locations. As long as most memory accesses are cached memory locations, the average latency of memory accesses will be closer to the cache latency than to the latency of main memory.

see more at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_cache

Each I/O device connected to your computer is mapped to a unique I/O (Input/Output) address. These addresses are assigned to every I/O port on your computer, including USB, Firewire, Ethernet, VGA, and DVI ports, as well as any other ports your computer might have.

Having a unique address assigned to each port allows your computer to easily recognize and locate devices attached to your computer. Whether it is a keyboard, mouse, monitor, printer, or any other device, the computer can locate it by its I/O address. Because I/O addresses are controlled by the computer's motherboard, they do not use up any system memory, or RAM.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA

Direct Memory Access (DMA) is a capability provided by some computer bus architectures that allows data to be sent directly from an attached device (such as a disk drive) to the memory on the computer's motherboard. The microprocessor is freed from involvement with the data transfer, thus speeding up overall computer operation. Usually a specified portion of memory is designated as an area to be used for direct memory access.

Hertz is a measurement unit for vibrations or frequencies (certain amount of vibration in a certain period of time).

It is an international measure of frequency or vibration equal to 1 cycle per second. The timing of microprocessor speed is measured in hz or mhz (Mega hz) or ghz(Giga hz).

A buffer is a data area shared by hardware devices or program processes that operate at different speeds or with different sets of priorities. The buffer allows each device or process to operate without being held up by the other. In order for a buffer to be effective, the size of the buffer and the algorithms for moving data into and out of the buffer need to be considered by the buffer designer. Like a cache, a buffer is a "midpoint holding place" but exists not so much to accelerate the speed of an activity as to support the coordination of separate activities.

Partitioning is the process of dividing one physical hard drive into separate areas of storage. In other words, you can create several logical hard drives out of one physical hard drive. This is useful for file storage purposes, installing multiple operating systems, and supporting multiple file system structures, such as FAT32 and NTFS (NT File System). Two partition types can be created on a hard drive: primary partitions and extended partitions:

Primary partitions: A primary partition is a partition that contains an active, bootable operating system, such as DOS or Windows. It is the partition that provides the system files necessary to boot into the operating system. A hard drive can be divided into four primary partitions, but only one of the four primary partitions can be set as the active partition. The active partition is specifically designated as the boot partition. It contains the MBR. The system BIOS looks to the active partition for boot-up commands. This partition is always labeled “C:.”

Extended partitions: Extended partitions can be separated into units called logical partitions. There can be up to 23 logical partitions on one hard drive. Each logical partition receives a different alphabetic assignment, such as D, E, or F. These partitions are used mostly for file and applications storage. Any partition other than the primary partition is considered an extended partition.