Personal computer hardware is very similar between desktops
and laptops.
But there are some differences in the smaller laptop form
factor.
In this video, we'll look at some
of those unique differences in laptop hardware.
One thing that you'll notice immediately
when sitting down at a laptop is that the keyboard
is very different.
You don't have the room that you have available on a desktop
computer, so a lot of the laptop keyboard functions
have been shrunk down into a smaller form factor.
For example, you'll notice the keyboard
itself is much more compact, many of the keys
are next to each other.
For instance, the function keys at the top
are much closer to the number keys at the top.
You'll also notice that some of the larger grouping of keys
to the right, such as page up and page down and delete,
are not on a laptop computer.
You simply don't have the room available to put
those extra keys off to the side.
There are some people, though, that
prefer these larger keyboards.
They might buy a larger laptop with a 17 inch
monitor or a very wide monitor.
And in those cases, you might have the regular keyboard
and then perhaps a numeric keypad off to the right.
But you'll notice you still don't
have the very large keyboard that you might
have with a desktop computer.
To be able to put all of the keys
you need into this smaller form factor,
you'll notice some keys like home, end, page up,
and page down are smaller buttons
at the top of the numeric keypad.
Every laptop is a little bit different
so you have to look at how the keyboard is laid out
to be able to find all of the keys that you might need.
The components that we use to store information
are also quite different on a laptop.
On a desktop computer, you may have a 3 and 1/2 inch hard
drive.
This is a relatively large drive when you compare it
to the smaller 2 and 1/2 inch drives that
are available inside of laptop computers.
On many laptop computers, we're using solid-state drives.
These are smaller drives that have no spinning parts,
no moving components.
They are all solid-state memory, and that's
where all of our information is being stored.
These drives are silent because they have no moving parts
and they're very fast response times
because you're writing directly to memory.
You'll find that the performance of an SSD
usually much better than a traditional hard drive.
This 2 and 1/2 inch form factor is very
common for hard drives in SSDs.
You might even find a 1.8 inch form factor
on older hard drives, although that form factor has slowly
become less popular because SSDs are
able to get smaller and smaller inside of the laptop case.
There's also a middle ground between
the traditional spinning hard drive and a solid-state drive,
and that would be a hybrid drive or an SSHD, solid-state hybrid
drive.
This is a drive that has both spinning components,
with the traditional hard drive, and solid-state components
that you would find in an SSD.
The SSD is often used to cache the information as it's being
read or written to the drive.
That way, you're able to write information very quickly
and then continue performing functions on your laptop.
The hybrid drive then takes all of the information in the SSD
and writes it to the hard drive separate from the operation
of your laptop.
And of course, you can still find
the traditional spinning hard drive and a 2 and 1/2 inch form
factor inside of laptop computers.
Even though an SSD does provide better performance,
we tend to find larger capacities
with the spinning hard drives.
So for the same amount of money, you
could store much more information
on a spinning hard drive versus an SSD.
The storage drives in a laptop are usually
accessible by removing a cover that's on the back
or removing the entire back of the laptop
to be able to gain access to those components.
These are usually relatively modular and easy to swap out.
You can take the cover off, remove a couple of screws,
and then remove the drive.
Here's the back of a typical laptop.
This laptop requires you to remove a number of screws
from the back and you remove the entire panel of the back.
Some laptops have a single panel that you
might remove to get access to individual pieces,
such as the memory modules.
Let's open this up and we'll look and see what's inside.
There's the laptop components.
We can see this is a 17 inch laptop.
It's relatively large.
It's designed to have multiple hard drives, which is not
really usual in a laptop.
But this particular model does have two separate storage
devices.
You can see the primary processor is here,
along with what appears to be the graphics card.
And the copper is the cooling that
goes to these heat sinks in the back that has a fan that
helps cool everything.
The memory modules are stacked one right on top of each other.
And we've got, on the bottom right, a number of cards.
This is my wireless LAN card.
There's a slot here for a wireless cellular card, which
I don't have in this laptop.
And then the Bluetooth card, the wireless PAN,
personal area network card.
These storage devices in laptops are
designed to be relatively easy to replace.
This one requires you to remove a couple of screws
and then it pops out.
Let's remove the first screw.
We'll remove the second screw.
And in this particular model, you
would simply lift up and remove the drive from the laptop.
To replace the drive, you simply reverse the process.
Push it into place, add the screws,
and now your laptop drive is back in place.
Just as our storage devices are smaller inside of a laptop as
compared to a desktop, we have the same situation
with our memory modules.
Inside of a laptop, you might find
a SO-DIMM and a Micro-DIMM.
These are small outline dual in-line memory
modules or the smaller micro-dual in-line memory
modules.
These are almost exclusively used
in laptops and smaller devices, although some of the very, very
small motherboards you might find on your desktop
might use micro-DIMMs or SO-DIMMs as well.
I've zoomed in on the memory modules
so we can see these a little bit better.
You can see there are two hooks on each side of the memory
module that holds these in.
If we pull these hooks out, the memory module pops up.
Then we can grab them by the edges
and remove the memory module from the laptop.
This laptop has two sets of memory modules.
So if we wanted to replace both of them,
we would do exactly the same thing.
Now let's replace the memory modules.
Notice that we're going to put the memory
modules in with these copper contacts going all the way
into that memory slot.
Make sure they're all the way down.
You don't want to have them sitting out just a little bit.
You want to be sure that they are completely in that slot.
And it shouldn't take any pressure to put these in.
They should slide right in without any pressure at all.
And then you can simply push down until they snap in place.
Now let's do this with the second memory module.
In this case, I'm going to turn the module around.
You'll notice the key is on the side.
If you do that, it will not fit into the memory module,
so don't force them in.
Instead, make sure the key is exactly in the place
you need it to be, it fits perfectly
with that memory module.
And then you should be able to snap those in place.
In many high security environments,
you may be required to use a smart card
as part of your authentication.
And so many laptops may include a smart card reader
built into the laptop itself.
So when you authenticate to the network,
you have to slide in your smart card
to be able to use that laptop.
If there is not a smart card reader integrated
into the laptop, you may have one
that works externally that connects to the laptop via USB.
Our laptops keep getting smaller and we
find that optical media is being used less and less.
And that's why you're not able to find
as many optical drives available on laptops
today as you have in the past.
If you do find a laptop that has an optical drive,
very often that optical drive can be removed and then
replaced with a separate storage drive or some other component.
If you do have an optical drive on a laptop,
it's nice to have one that can both read
and write to these optical drives
to use as a backup medium.
So this may be a CD-RM, or CD-ROM,
or it might be the newer DVD-RW, or DVD-ROM.
This is all available in a portable device
so that no matter where you are, you're
able to access or write to this optical media.
With many of our laptop technologies,
we're not connecting a physical cable into our network,
we're using wireless technologies.
And so you'll find in a laptop, there
may be a number of different wireless cards.
This laptop has three separate adapter spots.
One for an 802.11 wireless connection.
There's one that has a W-WAN, which would be a cellular based
wireless connection.
And then a W-PAN, the personal area network.
That would be the Bluetooth wireless network.
Here's a closer look at these three adapter slots.
You can see that there are wires connecting to each of these.
These are for the antennas.
Usually that antenna wire will wrap all the way
through the laptop and around the top of the LCD display.
You might also find different form factors
for these adapter cards that you would put into a laptop.
For example, the mini PCI card is on the left
and the smaller mini PCI Express card is on the right.
This laptop has a number of slots for mini PCI Express
cards, and I have one for the wireless personal area
network or the Bluetooth card.
And you can see there's a spot for W-PAN.
This is the W-PAN card.
And there's also an antenna here for Bluetooth
that is labeled blue.
To install the card, we put it all the way into those slots
so that we don't have any of that copper showing.
And then we would push it down.
And then this particular card has a single screw
that holds it in place on the right side.
Once that screw is down, the card is installed.
The only thing we have to do with these cards
is make sure that the antenna is also added.
This is a simple pressure.
These antennas install into the connector
by pushing onto the antenna connection on the adapter.
So you have to get it in just the right spot
and give just a little bit of pressure.
It doesn't take much and it snaps into place.
On a desktop computer, the video adapter
is usually built into the CPU.
It's a separate chip on the motherboard
or it's a separate interface card
that's installed in the system.
It's a very similar situation with laptops,
although most of the time, the video
is built into the processor or it's a separate chip
on the motherboard.
There's not enough room inside of a laptops
to have a full sized video card as a separate interface card.
Because these video adapters are part of the CPU
or are part of the system board, they're
not generally upgradable.
All so the vast majority of laptops you find
will have no ability to upgrade the video components.
There are some laptops, though, that
do allow you to upgrade the video components
inside of that laptop.
These are usually larger systems and they're
built for people that need high-end graphics capabilities
in a mobile platform.
We commonly use LCD displays on our desktop computers.
And we're also using LCD displays on our laptops
as well.
These liquid crystal displays are very light
and they provide a very high resolution screen.
These are, of course, very fragile.
Because these laptops tend to be moved from place to place,
you want to be sure to get a laptop that is well
protected whenever you're moving it
from one location to another.
One challenge with LCDs is that the resolutions
are fixed on the screen.
You can't buy a larger screen and you
can't change the resolutions of the one that
exists inside of the laptop.
So if you make changes to the native resolution,
you may find that the graphics and the information you
are viewing on the screen are not as crisp,
they're a little bit fuzzy.
So you need to make sure you're using the native resolution
to have the best possible viewing on this LCD screen.
Our computers need direct current to be able to operate.
And on our desktop computers, there's
usually a power supply that's built into the case.
On laptop computers, we don't have that same amount of room,
so usually the power conversion is
done on an external device that provides DC power directly
into the laptop.
And usually, there will be a power interface.
And this might be very different as you look at different laptop
computers.
This one happens to be a rounded yellow connector
on the back of the laptop.
Here's an example of an external power supply
that's used for a laptop.
This may be an auto-switching laptop power supply, which
means you could use it on many different types of power
systems, or it may be fixed input.
This converts our AC coming from the wall
into DC that can be used by the laptop computer.
And usually, you'll see these available to run
at 110 volts or 220 volts, depending on where
you happen to be in the world.
These power supplies are very specific to the make
and the model of the laptop you're using.
So if you need to replace a power supply,
make sure you replace it with one that's
compatible with your system.
It's very useful if you can decipher
some of this information that's on the back of a laptop power
adapter.
This is a power adapter from Dell.
You can see the part number listed and the model number.
The input voltages on this particular power supply
will support either 100 or 240 volts of AC power.
That's the squiggly line.
And it provides that at 50 or 60 Hertz and inputs 2.0
amps into this power supply.
This power supply will output 19.5 volts of DC power.
This is the symbol for DC power, which
is the solid line with the dashed line underneath.
And it outputs 4.62 amps of DC power.
The maximum amount of output power
that this particular power adapter will provide
is 90 watts of power for this laptop.
One of the most common battery technologies
used on our laptops today is lithium ion.
This is one that does not have a memory effect that many of us
remember from older battery technologies.
You don't have to deplete the entire battery before charging
it back up like you use to do with the older style batteries.
With lithium ion, you can charge it at any time
and you're not going to have a significant decrease
of its charging capabilities.
However, with lithium ion, every time you charge the battery,
there is a little bit of a diminished capacity.
So eventually, as you use that battery through the years,
you'll find that it doesn't charge as much as it needs to
and you'll need to replace the battery.
One thing that you'll notice between laptop versions
is that they often use different form factors for the batteries.
So this is another scenario where
you'll need to look at the make and the model of the laptop
and make sure that you're purchasing
a battery that is specifically designed for that system.
Here's an example of two different form factors.
You can see the battery on the top
has connectors on the end that would connect in that laptop.
And then a completely different laptop
has a different type of connectivity that it might use.
So it's important to make sure that you're
buying the right battery for the right laptop.
Laptops are very mobile computing devices
and you are often using this device on your lap.
That means there's not a lot of room
to be able to use a traditional mouse.
For that reason, laptops include other types of mouse input.
Very commonly, a touchpad is used.
This is usually just underneath the keyboard.
You would use your finger to move around on the screen using
this touchpad.
And then there are left and right
buttons that are the same as the left and right buttons
that you might find on a traditional mouse.
Depending on the laptop, you might have other input choices
available.
This one also has a pointing stick that's
in the middle of the keyboard.
You would put your finger on that pointing stick
and simply push it in a direction,
and it will move the mouse around the screen.
With a desktop system, we're not moving it from place to place
and we often aren't concerned with how heavy
that system happens to be.
But with a laptop that we're dragging from one place
to another, we're very concerned about how heavy this device is.
But it also has to be very durable.
For that reason, the frame around the laptop
might be plastic so that it's very lightweight and very
mobile but still very durable and difficult to break.
These are usually very inexpensive to make
as well, which keeps the cost of the laptop down.
Some laptops may have an aluminum metal case,
which is certainly more durable but more difficult
to repair if you happen to get a dent or break
inside of that case.
We watch a lot of media and listen to music on our laptop,
so it's important that we have speakers on these devices
as well.
These are usually self-contained into the laptop itself.
We don't have the luxury of external speakers
that we might have on a desktop system.
But because these are smaller speakers that
are inside the case, it may not have the same quality
that you're accustomed to seeing on a desktop computer.
There's sometimes a left and a right channel
that you can hear on the laptop, so you might get stereo sound.
And some larger laptops may have a speaker underneath that's
used as a subwoofer.
With desktop computers, the motherboards
are all a very standard set of sizes.
But with laptops, you'll find that different models
of laptops have very different sizes.
These proprietary laptop motherboards
are built this way because you only
have so much room available in a laptop case.
This also means that if you have any problems with any component
that is on that laptop motherboard,
you're going to have to replace the entire motherboard.
And usually, this involves removing a lot of components
from the laptop to finally get the motherboard out
of the system and then replace it and put everything back
into that system.
Another component that's very different
between a desktop computer and a laptop computer
is the central processing unit, or CPU.
These are designed for mobile systems, which
means they're going to use as little power as possible
because you're often using a battery.
And they're going to try to create as little heat as
possible because it's very difficult to cool that very
small laptop form factor.
We also try to put as many integrated components
on the CPU as possible so that you
don't need additional pieces on the motherboard.
So your video controller and your memory controller
are very often part of the CPU instead
of being a separate component.
On most laptops, you're not able to upgrade
the CPU that might be built inside of that laptop system.
You may be able to replace it in case there's a problem,
but generally these laptop motherboards
are built for one specific kind of CPU.
And these laptops CPUs generally don't run as fast
as a desktop system because you have
to worry about the heat and the size of this system
inside of this very small laptop package.