Computer Upgrade Glossary

Here is a list of upgrade-related terms that you might want to learn.

Adapter Card. This is a printed circuit board that plugs into a slot in the motherboard. Various devices are found on adapter cards, and they use different kinds of slots. The current video adapter slots are called "AGP" slots for "advanced graphics processor." Most other slots are called PCI slots. Older devices plug into ISA slots. The size is different, and this can be a real issue if you upgrade your motherboard and the new one comes with a different set of slots. Your existing adapter cards might not plug into your new motherboard, forcing you to go buy another video or network or sound card.

Floppy Drives. Some computers come without a floppy drive now. These are the drives that take the floppy diskettes. The drives themselves aren't floppy and never were. You probably haven't seen a really floppy floppy disk in many years. The 3-1/2" diskettes that we call "floppy" today are stored in rigid plastic shells that don't flop like the old 5-1/4" and 8" disks used to. It has promoted office safety because one is less inclined to throw the new ones like a frisbee, which could put someone's eye out.

Hard Drives (or Hard Disk). These, in contrast to the floppy drives, are rigid. Almost all hard drives are stored inside the computer's case. They come in a variety of sizes, and the price is headed for $1 per gigabyte. They come in 3 different speeds, 5400RPM, 7200ROM, and 10000RPM. I have been really impressed with the mechanics of hard drives. It's the most amazing engineering feat I have ever seen, and I'm amazed that they work at all. My most recent hard drive purchase was 100 Gigabytes, and it seems like a whole lot of space. A computer with less than 20 gigabytes of disk space these days is probably very cluttered, and runs slowly.

SCSI Adapter Card. Pronounced "scuzzy," This is the acronym for "small computer system interface." SCSI adapter cards enable the connection of SCSI compatible devices to the computer. Some scanners, CD-ROMS, and hard drives are SCSI. Often, these are more expensive devices, because they are faster. Throughput on a SCSI drive often exceeds throughput for IDE drives.

Motherboard. This printed circuit board is usually the largest component inside the case. In the 80s they were about 18" by 12", but today they are about 10" by 6". The motherboard is easy to spot because it has a CPU chip, expansion slots, and RAM slots, along with a jungle of wires and cables plugged into it. This board is also referred to as a "system board." During the last couple of years, Intel has been making motherboards that have everything built into them except the CPU and the RAM. Some computers being sold today have no adapter cards in them at all.

Video adapter. The Video adapter is most often a printed circuit board plugged into one of the motherboard's expansion slots. These babies are coming with more RAM than computers used to have, and their own graphics processor chips as well. This is an often overlooked system bottleneck. Sometimes you can get a visible improvement in computer performance by changing your graphics settings to 256 colors and your resolution to 800x600. 

RAM. This acronym is the initials for Random Access Memory. These chips are where the data is put while the CPU is working on it. In the old Desktop metaphor, your hard drive was a filing cabinet, and RAM was the information on the papers on your desk. I don't mean that the documents on your computer's "desktop" are in RAM - that would be mixing metaphors and we avoid mixing metaphors here.

Operating System. The program files that communicate between the application programs and the hardware. Popular operating systems are Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.

Drivers. These files, generally written by hardware manufacturers, are "attachments" or "appendices" for the operating system, allowing application programs to communicate with those devices.