Computer systems consist of hardware and software.
The hardware the components that we can touch and feel for example, a mouse or keyboard,
a monitor or the desktop tower itself. The software the programs that interact with the hardware
so that it can perform the task that we need it to do.
Let's take a look at the inside of the computer tower
and see what the hardware components are
what I've done is I've taken the side of a case of a desktop tower,
and we can see the circuitry
and other components that are inside it
you'll notice that there is a large green circuit board
on the bottom of the case, this is called the motherboard,
and the motherboard is the main circuit board located inside the PC
and it contains most of the electronics.
in the center of this motherboard,
we see a cooling fan and underneath that cooling fan there's a silver heatsink
and these are on top of the central processing unit or CPU for short
the CPU is going to be the brains of the computer system
and this is what does all of the processing and
calculations that we need as we're working on the computer
this is an example that I am holding of a CPU chip
you can see that it's not very big
but that's actually what does all the processing
for our computers as were working on the tasks
next to the
CPU we've got two sticks of ram
or random access memory the random access memory is going to be a temporary
storage location it's volatile storage
so it only stores instructions or pieces of a document
that we work on for example up while we had the computer running.
When we turn the computer off, those instructions are removed from the random access memory
and they are not there the next time we turn the computer on
next to the
CPU on the other side we see what's called an expansion slot
an expansion slot is the way that we can connect
adapter cards to the motherboard so that we can connect
additional hardware components for example we would need an adapter card for
a monitor, we would need an adapter card if we were working with a wired network for example,
and this is an example of where we would plug in that adapter card
on the back side at the computer you'll notice that there is another cooling fan
and that cooling fan is designed to help circulate the air through the computer system itself
so that it keeps all the components cool down and they don't overheat.
In the top of the computer tower
we see a silver box and this is going to be our power supply
which provides the electrical power needed by the entire computer system itself
everything in here that needs electricity
is going to be connected to the power supply.
Also connected to the motherboard
via the SATA cables that you see here are going to be your
optical drives and your hard drive
The optical drive examples are going to be
your CD, your DVD, your Blu ray players,
and the hard drive is going to be
the storage location where we install our files install our operating system
you can save your documents to the hard drive itself.
now what I'd like to do is move
this case and show you the inside
of a hard drive. Most people if they've opened up the case of a computer have
seen the hard drive itself
but they've never seen the inside of a hard drive and how that operates
Now if you're working on a computer that you want to continue using you never
want to open up the hard drive
because this is actually going to void the warranty
you'll notice that inside this hard drive we have some
round platters and these are the actual disc we also have an actuator arm that comes out
and has the read/write head on the tip of it
so that it can go back and forth and find the data.
When we power on the computer the disk will spin
and that actuator arm will move back and forth looking for the data that we need
to work on our computer system.
in this particular example you'll see that that actuator arm
is moving in and out
and that's kinda the noise that we hear, the humming sometimes that we hear
when we turn the computer on.
When we're done working with our computer we shut it down
then that simply
stops the disk drives on the inside of the drive
and parks the actuator arm so that it's safe
to move onto another task.
The adapter cards that I mentioned earlier that fit
into an expansion slot
may include a video adapter such as this one
this one actually has a cooling fan
on top of the the processing unit
for the video card and i can tell that this is a video card because of the
adaptor ports that are on these outside edge these are the items that we would
see from the outside the case
for example a VGA port or DVI port
or in this case it also has an HDMI port
so these are some examples
of the components that are inside a desktop computer
and I hope you've enjoyed looking around and continue to learn more about
the components inside the computer and how they all work together