17/01/2012
The newspaper adverts scream out prices, and include seemingly meaningless abbreviations such as MHz, ATA-100, DDR, XGA. Do you know what these buzzwords really mean? Does anyone?
The PC may be the single most important tool for many workers, but because it is often purchased in a high street camera store or even a supermarket, it is often treated as a commodity item, almost a ‘white good’ such as a fridge, freezer or microwave.
First the good news. There are no bad Personal Computer systems. The least powerful system available today is better than the most expensive system of a few years ago. High quality components are produced in such large numbers at such low prices, that there is no profit building substandard systems.
The bad news is that the process doesn’t stop, and the most expensive or most powerful system you buy today will be (practically) obsolete next year.
If you want to know how a PC works and what all the jargon means, this section will attempt to answer your questions. No technical background is assumed, and even very complex issues will be explained in terms that everyone can understand.
Who Made It?
Your computer wasn’t made by the company from which you bought it. If you buy a car from Ford, you expect the frame, engine, transmission, generator, and other parts to come from Ford or at least be built to Ford specifications. That isn’t how the computer industry works. The companies that sell computers and whose names you know, such as Dell, Gateway, IBM, and Compaq, don’t make any of the important parts. Instead, they assemble a computer from parts made by other companies.
Your computer was really made by companies such as Asus, Abit, ATI, and AMD. This is really an international business with companies scattered around the world. They are not scattered uniformly. For reasons that are not clear, different countries seem to specialize in particular parts. The US companies build the CPU (Intel, AMD). The motherboard comes from Taiwan (Asus, Abit, Shuttle, MSI, ...). Disks come from Singapore or Indonesia (Seagate, Western Digital, IBM, Maxtor). Memory most often comes from Korea. The external case and the power supply come from any of a dozen Chinese companies.
You can buy the components from any number of sites on the internet and assemble a computer yourself, but you won’t save any money this way. The big computer makers buy parts in lots of a thousand, packaged in bulk
Personal Computer Hardware