What’s Inside Your Computer? – Elf Knows It [ARCHIVED]
HAVE you ever wondered what’s inside that purring box on your floor? Some people think it’s little fairies that make the magic on your screen, personally I like that idea better, but sadly it’s not the truth. There’s quite a lot that makes your computer tick over. Let’s break it down.
Motherboard
This is the foundation of the inside of your computer, every component either sits on, or is connected to the motherboard. You could look at it as the road system of your computer, there are connections to every component on this. That’s how they all communicate.
Hard Drive (High-Density Disk)
Commonly mistaken as the shell, or box of your computer, the hard drive is actually a piece of hardware inside your computer where all your data is stored. All your pictures, music etc are stored on this piece of hardware for the computer to read.
Graphics Card
When you connect your screen to your computer, the little jack at the back that you plug it into has much more to offer on the other side. Inside the computer, your graphics card takes information from the motherboard, and other components and feeds it onto your screen for you to view.
Power Supply
The power supply is where the computer gets all its juice from, the power supply connects to the motherboard, powering it and all the components on it. Other componets like the hard drive, and disc drives connect to the power supply individually.
CPU
The CPU, the brain of the computer. The CPU is where your computer gets its processing power from, all data, number crunching and logics all get worked out by the CPU.
RAM (Random Access Memory)
Random Access Memory is like the short term memory of your computer. When you load a programme, view a picture etc. They are loaded into RAM, because your hard drive has to physically move to read data, while RAM doesn’t, so it can read data quicker.
BIOS (Basic Input/Output System)
The BIOS is a collection of the most basic software/drivers to make your computer running, when you first turn on your computer and you see the black screen with some text whirl in front of you for a second or two. That’s the bios, it basically loads the system in its most basic state, ready to load your OS.
There is so much more that goes into making your computer work. But these are the basics to making your favourite music or website appear in front of you (I still prefer the fairies)
