The main circuit board of a microcomputer. The motherboard contains the connectors for attaching additional boards. Typically, the motherboard contains the cpu, Bios, memory, mass storage interfaces, serial and parallel ports, expansion slots, and all the controllers required to control standard peripheral devices, such as the display screen, keyboard, and disk drive. Collectively, all these chips that reside on the motherboard are known as the motherboard's chipset.
The modem connects you to the internet, dials a phone number, or receives a fax.
The CPU or the Central Processing unit is the brain of the computer and the single most important chip in the computer. Modern processors contain millions of transistors which are etched onto a tiny square silicon called a die, which is about the with of a standard thumb. The CPU performs the system's calculating and processing. The majority of personal computers included the Intel processors. Intel released the first processor, the 4004 in 1970. Today the market is being shared by other companies such as the popular AMD processor manufactured by the AMD company.
A cpu fan is a fan that cools the cpu. [go figure] Without the fan it will cause the cpu to overheat witch in turn causes lockup problems.
A power supply is where you normally plug the power cord into. The unit converts 110 volts to 12 volts to supply the computer and its components power.
The ribbon cable is what connects the hard-drive, cd rom, and floppy to the motherboard.
What is Ram or Memory?
Although memory is technically any form of electronic storage, it is used most often to identify fast, temporary forms of storage. If your computer's Cpu had to constantly access the hard drive to retrieve every piece of data it needs, it would operate very slowly. When the information is kept in memory, the CPU can access it much more quickly. Most forms of memory are intended to store data temporarily.
The mechanism that reads and writes data on a hard disk. Hard disk drives (HDDs) for PCs generally have seek times of about 12 milliseconds or less. Many disk drives improve their performance through a technique called caching.
