Things You Need To Know About Personal Computer Hardware

Necessity is the mother of innovation. The saying holds true for computers too. Computers were made-up because of man's seek out for speedy and perfect calculating tools. Increasing reputation of computers has established that it is a very influential and functional tool. The power and usefulness of this popular tool are mainly due to many characteristics like:

- Automatic

- Speed

- Accuracy

- Diligence

- Versatility

- Power of remembering

- No I.Q

- No feelings

Categories of Computer Hardware

Hardware refers to the apparatus which can be touched and seen within the computer. There are two main categories in which computer hardware exists. First one is Input devices, and second one is Output devices. Processing and storage devices are also a part of computer hardware.

Input Devices

An input device is an electromechanical device that accepts data from the outside world and translates into a form a computer can interpret. Several input devices are available today. They can be largely classified into subsequent categories:

- Keyboard devices

- Point and draw devices

- Data scanning devices

- Digitizer

- Electronic cards based devices.

- Speech recognition devices

- Vision based devices.

Output Devices

An output device is an electromechanical device that accepts data from a computer and translates them into a form suitable for use of the outside world. Several output devices are available today. The chief output devices are as follows:

- Monitors

- Printers

- Plotters

- Screen Image projector

- Voice response system

Processing Devices

The main purpose of all the processing devices is to interpret the data, process it and produce the result. The chief processing hardware device is CPU.

Central processing unit

CPU is the brain of a computer system. All major calculations and comparisons performed by a compute are carried out inside its CPU. It is also responsible for activating and controlling the operations for other units of a computer system. Hence, no other single component of a computer system determines its overall performance as much as it's CPU.

Storage devices

The purpose of storage devices is to store the data, which was processed by CPU. This way they processed data can be reused for any time later. There are two chief types of storage space devices. One is the main storage and other one is secondary storage.

Primary Storage:

In a computer system main memory is known as the primary storage. This built-in memory allows CPU to store and retrieve data very quickly. The rate of fetching data from this memory is of the order of 50 nanoseconds/byte.

The primary storage is categorized as follows:

- Random access memory

- Read-only memory

- Programmable read-only memory

- Cache memory.

Secondary storage:

Secondary storage is non-volatile and has lower cost per bit stored, but it generally has an operating speed far slower than that of primary storage. It is used to store large volume of data.

Following is the examples of secondary storage devices:

- Floppy disk

- Hard disk

- CD-ROM

- DVD

- Flash drive

Knowing about the computer hardware is very imperative as we can understand the problems when they arise during operation.