The Technical Pages offer a more detailed insight to your PC

The technical pages offer an overview and more detailed or technical writing for those wanting to know more about the personal computer.
In the left margin you will find links to all my technical pages on this site, which are not intended for new users.

Getting Started

As this area of the site develops we will add more, detailed sections on the motherboard and components, devices attached to the motherboard, peripherals that interface with the computer, operating systems, applications and networking.

The PC, universally referred to as any IBM compatible computer, drastically changed the role of computers, from an as needed, as available managed computer too a growing and accelerating industry. Basic PC hardware can do almost nothing without complex instructions. Even today's powerful hardware merely performs a power on self test and load the first bit of data from the disk. To successfully use a personal computer requires some expertise. Writing computer programs can develop better understanding of how computers do what they do and an insight into applications used on a computer. In the early days of personal computers BASIC (Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) was part of the system and primarily used to instruct the computer to perform operations. Many early applications were written in BASIC. Learning how complex tasks can be programmed as instructions, then refined, helps to understand how computers work. There are background instructions keeping the computer functioning, input and output processing, in case of key presses or mouse movements and screen updates. Versions of BASIC are still used today. QBASIC is still supplied free within MS-DOS and Visual BASIC is used to design applications with the same user interface as Windows. This site is intended to be about personal computer hardware and so it is left for the reader to pursue any programming skills.

A basic computer has four key components, the CPU (Central Processing Unit) or processor, input and output (I/O) expansion such as keyboard, display and disk storage. Other components primarily support them, such as the motherboard, buses, expansion cards or power supply unit. The motherboard brings together individual boards that used to be housed separately, before personal computers. The processor, memory, serial ports, parallel port, keyboard interface, disk interface and buses. The processor executes instructions at low level and knows how to add, subtract and simple logical functions. The computers memory is workspace for all activity and is limited by the size. The number and variety of applications that can be made available at any one time is largely determined by the amount of memory, usually in megabytes (MB), millions of bytes (kilobytes are thousands of bytes, KB). Input and output (I/O) is used by the computer to read and write data using I/O devices called peripherals, including the monitor, printer or storage devices. Storage devices are used to keep data stored, when it is not in the computers memory.