Looking at hardware

The personal computer is the universal technical system. Its configuration (structure of the equipment) can be changed as required. Your computer is made up of many parts called hardware. Your hardware runs software – programs that translate the instructions you send to your computer into a language it can understand. If you are not familiar with the terms hardware, floppy disk, and operating system, you should read this text before setting up or using the operating system.

The base configuration of a hardware that makes up the most basic computer system includes three devices: a monitor, a keyboard, and a system unit. In a system unit are placed the most important components which are called internal. The system unit holds your computer’s processor, memory, disk drives, ports, and video card. To a system unit also are connected external and peripheral units. On appearance system units differ with the form of tank. Tanks can be horizontal (desktop) and vertical (tower).

Procesor and memory

The central processing unit (CPU) and memory are located on chips inside the system unit. The processor is a main chip of the PC in which all calculations are made. The processor consists of cells in which the data can vary. Internal cells of the processor are named as registers.

Key parameters of the processor: an operating voltage, a digit capacity, working clock rate, coefficient of an internal clock multiplying, a size of the cache memory.

The processor is connected to other devices of a computer groups of the explorers called as buses. Main 3 buses are the address bus, the data bus, the bus of commands.

The address bus is connected to it the processor for copying data from a cell in one of registers. On the data bus there is a copying data from the RAM in registers of the processor and back. The bus of commands is commands act from the RAM, from areas where programs are stored.

The CPU is the brain of your computer. This is the place where your computer interprets and processes information. You may have heard computer memory referred to as RAM. The term RAM stands for random access memory. The instructions that your computer gets and the information your computer processes are kept in RAM during your work session.

Your computer’s RAM is not a permanent storage place for information; it is active only when your computer is on. When you turn off your computer, information is deleted from memory. To avoid losing your work, remember to save it on a disk, a permanent storage device, before turning off your computer.

Computer memory is measured in kilobytes or megabytes of information. (A byte is the amount of storage needed to hold one character). One kilobyte equals 1024 bytes, and one megabyte equals 1,048,576 bytes. Software requires a minimum amount of random access memory to work properly. You can usually find memory requirements on software packaging, or you can ask your software dealer.

4. Translate the following word-combinations:

central processing unit disk drive

random access memory basic computer system

permanent storage place software packaging

computer processor operating system

permanent storage device software dealer

memory requirements to work properly

5. Find sentences with the following words in the text.

Тranslate the sentences:

is made up make up are located

may have heard are kept is deleted

is measured

6. Speak about processor and memory and other parts your computer consist of.