1. IT Hardware Left: The on-board L2 cache. Right: The Pentium® Pro processor core with 5.5 million transistors. Source: IntelIntel

2. Motherboard: components bus, chipset, CPU, memory

3. Motherboard: bus system data bus address bus system/control bus expansion slots ISA, EISA, VESA,SCSI, PCI, AGP How local bus works?How local bus works? PCI vs VESAPCI vs VESA Bus speedsBus speeds: Pentium 4 and AthlonXPPentium 4 AthlonXP

4. Motherboard: chipset components of the chipset memory controller I/O controller bus controller cache controller chipset desirable features EDO (Extended Data Out) RAM Pipeline Burst (Synchronous) SRAM cache PCI local bus APM (Advanced Power Management) ECC (error correction code) or no ECC? types of chipsets

5. Main Memory basic concepts memory banks (0,1,2): 64 Meg to 1 Gig SIMMs (single in-line memory modules), DIMMS (dual in- line memory modules), SDRAM ( synchronous DRAM ) SIMMs older, DIMMS old, SDRAM newer PCs organization: conventional and extended additional references Upgrading memory c|net RAM Primer PNY Electronics: configure memoryconfigure memory Crucial memory selectormemory selector

6. Disk drives Hard-drives Overview Speed Interfaces: IDE, SCSI, SATA, IDE vs SCSIIDESCSISATA IDE vs SCSI CD and DVD basics: CD standard and DVD standards basicsCD standardDVDstandards Interface: ATAPI ATAPI USB flash drives Overview

7. Disk drive performance Fragmentation : overview and defragmentation software. overview Compression: overview and file, folder and drives compression in Windows. overview Cache: overview and hardware vs. software overview Swap file (paging file): overview and changing its size overview File System: NTFS, FAT32, FAT

8. Others graphics cards: BIOS and memory monitors: resolution, size, analog vs. digital printers: ink, laser, color, speed. Modems: phone lines, cable and DSL scanners digital cameras