The Chronicles
June 2008
Salutations dear readers and fellow Laurentian neighbors,
As I travel all over the Laurentians meeting people who are considering buying a computer, who have a new computer or who have had a computer for a while, I am noticing that many of you do not understand much of the lingo associated to certain of its components. Allow me therefore to present you with a couple of these terms. In order to do so, let's compare our computer to a human being...
The hard-drive would be our skull and an operating system (such as XP and Vista) would be our brain.
Since we have a brain (and specialized sections therein) we are able to do many, many things such as see, smell, hear, dance, laugh, cook, drive ... Since our computer has an operating system it can therefore host programs which allow it to perform tasks.
For example, with Picasa the computer is a photo album, with iTunes it's a music system, with Word it's a type writer and on and on it goes.
So when you read in an ad e.g. "200 gig hard drive" you could translate that as ... the bigger the skull, the more capacity it has to hold multiple programs in its operating system so you can do more varied things.
Then there's what we call random access memory e.g. 1 gig. The more random access memory a computer has the more various tasks it can perform simultaneously.
So hard disk space is a little like our long-term memory and random access memory like our short-term memory.
And that's about it in a nutshell ... a hard drive contains the operating system within which run programs at the end of which we get a multi-tasking machine which helps make our life easier ... well ... once we get to know how to operate our friend better!
Bye for now and look after yourselves!
questions.monamilordi@gmail.com
This article originally appeared in Main Street – The Laurentians' English Language Community Newspaper.
