A computer is a simply device (believe it or not) for data manipulation using program instructions based on your input. Computers have revolutionized communication in the world as we presently know it.

A computer has certain basic components. I'll list them out with some commonly known information as well.

Case: or tower, different sizes, shapes and colors these days are available.

Motherboard: This is the unit that hold's everything together. It's like the frame of your car, everything is bolted to it.

Central Processing Unit: CPU or processor or Chip, this is the little fan dangled object that does all the smart stuff so you can do whatever task's you'll need to do with your computer.

Random Access Memory: known as RAM or just memory. The more and the faster it runs the better.

Power Supply & adaptors: just know that your computer needs this to take power from the wall and gives it to the board which powers up everything else.

Video display: VGA adapter or graphics adapter too. If you'll be playing games you'll want a large one of these.

Removable Media: storage device of some sort, floppy drive, CD, DVD, Media card. This is basically anything your computer can put information on that you can walk away with.

Internal Storage: known as your hard disk or hard drive or just 'drive'. This is an extremely fast spinning device that stores all your files and your operating system.

Networking cards: if you don't know what this is you probly don't need to. It's most commonly used for connecting more than one computer together in a network or to get your computer out to the internet.

Basics of computer shopping:

Best advice I can give, shop around (:--). Ask allot of questions. Basically you are going to want a computer with the largest CPU, most amount of RAM, large hard drive etc. A decent speed tower for 2006 is 3GHZ CPU, 1 Gig Ram, 250 Gig hard disk. Basically get the biggest baddest machine you can for the least amount of donuts (dollars).

Computer technology is moving ahead in leaps and bounds. Here are some other terms you may have heard before and wondered what they meant.

So what's a 'web server'?

Just a name for a computer that 'serves' out files to people that have requested them. When you visit a web page you will be requesting some computer located somewhere in the world to upload that webpage from their computer to yours. Since their files are the ones serving the files to you they are called 'web servers'. Sort of like when you are on MSN and you send a picture of someone from your computer to theirs. In this case your computer is actually 'serving' the files to theirs.

Load Balancing Web Server - getting techie here.

Today millions of computers are connected to the Internet with hundreds of millions of sites combined. Some servers like search engines and email servers get a huge number of visitors. If the number of visitors to any one site increases the page loading takes more time since the server has to handle all these visitors simultaneously and serve out or upload those files to the computer that has requested to view that web page. The solution to such a problem is called load balancing. The load is distributed by the load balancing web server to other linked computers and processors to reduce computing time and communicate with the visitor computers who have requested the webpage.

Laptops - pretty cool if you need it.

Laptops are portable computers called laptops because they are usually used with the computer placed on the lap of the user. Laptops weigh between 3 to 4 kgs and run on batteries. The falling price levels have popularized laptops to a great extent. The present day laptops are light, have exceptional computing power, are affordable, and have sleek aesthetic appeal. They are used in various applications like programming large machines like CNC machines, Co-ordinate measuring machines etc. As laptops are transported a lot, a water resistant model is very much desirable. Panasonic has launched a waterproof laptop model available in Japan. Though not completely waterproof, it is resistant to coffee or water spills. There are commercial laptop variants available like the Dell latitude which is very popular. The latitude has Intel dual core processors, weighs 4.7 pounds, has 2MB L2 cache, has wide aspect screens of 12, 14 and 15 inches and larger, 512 MB RAM and 4 USB ports. More ram the merrier I say!

Tablet PCs.

Tablet PCs are light weight slate shaped hand-held computers. A tablet PC consists of a hand held touch screen with a light pen or stylus. Tablet PCs usually have inbuilt handwriting recognition software to recognize whatever is written on the screen with the stylus. In tablet PCs a keyboard is not required as data input can be done by touch or writing with the stylus. These are quite pricy but good for face to face business presentations.

Summary.

Computers have revolutionized the way we live and have a tremendous effect on our civilization, shaping the future. Computers are becoming more powerful and more affordable everyday. We hope this helps take a bit of the techie out of the basics of computers because they really are quite simple.