Essential Digital Skills Level 1

111 videos, 7 hours and 55 minutes

Course Content

Inside a computer

Video 9 of 111
2 min 3 sec
English
English
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In this film, we are just going to talk about what is inside a computer. But before we talk about this, it is important that you do not go opening up your computer. If you do open it up, there is a high risk that you could electrocute yourself because they all run on electricity. So even if it is a battery-powered laptop, you can still get an electric shock from that. In addition to that, if you start opening up computers, you can invalidate your warranty. It depends on the type, a lot of laptops you might be able to do anything with. Some desktop computers, you can open up because they have ports in them, you can add things and change things to them. But to start with, at entry-level, do not go open it up, there is nothing inside that computer that you are going to be able to service and do not just open it up to have a look because you could hurt yourself or you could invalidate your warranty.

Once you do look at what is in the computer itself, there is a lot of different components. So just, generally speaking, there is the main power supply, this is where on a desktop computer, the mains power will come into the computer and it will be transformed down to the operating voltage of the computer. You have also got the motherboard, which is where all of the circuitry, the actual computer is. You have got the central processing unit, which is like the brains of the computer. There may be external drives inside. So maybe you got to see the ROM drive on your computer. There is also all the ports across the back and probably the front of the computer as well and these will be where you connect up your monitor, your speakers, your microphone or any other connections you have. Another section is the RAM. These are usually circuit boards with data or chips on them and you can have more of those, different computers have different levels on. There is the modem, which is what connects it directly out to the internet and also the hard drive; this is where all the data is stored on your computer and again, the size of this will vary depending on the computer that you have.