Hardware

From Grokdoc

What is a computer's hardware? It is everything you can physically touch, all those components that have a real weight, as opposed to all the software, operating system, programs.

Here we do provide you only with an unsorted list of hardware item that may or may not be found at your computer. Perhaps one of these items is what you wanted to find the name for, or at least one of those gives you a starting point for further searching.

• Monitor: ( or screen, or CRT, or display, or TFT):

That is the device that displays texts, pictures, symbols.

• Keyboard:

Where you type.

• Mouse, touchpad or pointer

A device that allows you to move a special cursor over the screen in a graphical user interface.

• Harddisk:

The long term memory of the computer. A storage place for information, be it pictures, texts, documents, software, files, music or video, mails.

• Floppy, CD and DVD drives.

Removable media allows you to add new software to the system. CD-writers and DVD-writers can be used to make a backup of your files.

• Printer:

If it works correctly, it may copy pictures or texts on paper.

• Scanner:

Reads an image from a paper or book and makes available that image for further processing (storage, filtering out the text contents, cutting out pictures and place them elsewhere, send away as a Fax or e-mail)

• Modem:

Older dialups may have a modem in the Computer to talk to other networks over a phone line.

• NIC (Network Card):

This is often an Ethernet card to talk to a local network or a cable modem. Wireless ethernet (WiFi) has become popular lately.

• Controller Card:

These cards manage drives, and are usually classified as SCSI, RAID, SATA and IDE. Some of these can require special driver modules to be loaded during the installation.

Think of a book as an example: The hardware would be a number of paper sheets, some cardboard, and a few cubic millimeters of black ink. The software would be the contents of the pages, that is the text and pictures inside the book, somhow encoded in the geometrical pattern of the ink on the pages' surfaces. Unlike the book most computers are capable of being rewritten with new and/or other software.