It is a pretty well known fact that the personal computer has advanced at an exponential rate over the last 30 years or so. It was the IBM released in 1981 that was considered the first with a PC label. Check out its operating specifications:

• Monitor - monochrome (optional colour monitor)
• Hard Drive - N/A
• Floppy Drive - 2 x 160K
• Memory - 16k to 256K
• Serial Interface - RS232 (x2)
• Speed 4.77MHz
• Operating System (OS) -DOS 1.0 16-bit (could run on BASIC without an OS)
  

It was during the 70's that I was first introduced to a computer when I was studying at college learning how to program in the 'Basic' language. Back in those days your code had to be absolutely perfect and a missed 'dot' or 'colon' anywhere in your code would result in the nightmare 'syntax error' which told you there was a problem but absolutely nothing about what or where the problem was.

I didn't really like computers in those early years, you can complain about software programs and systems today but they are literally light years ahead of their predecessors.

This also applies to the hardware, development of the basic building blocks has been astonishing to say the least, particularly when you consider, processing power, memory and miniaturisation as part of the equation.

Writing about computers then becomes a bit of a moving target and the words are likely to be out of date before you can finish an article. That said by avoiding talking about specific processors, DRAM (dynamic random access memory) boards and hard drives and only referring to the basic components that make up a personal computer I would hope that this hub will remain useful for some time, the reason being that although the basic components can change drastically over time they still provide the same basic functions albeit with more storage capability, faster processing speeds and in smaller packages.

Laptop Computers on amazon.co.uk  for anyone based in the UK.

Whether you are considering a desktop PC or a laptop PC they are both constructed of the same building blocks, but just packaged a little differently, laptop computer parts are much smaller and arranged to be compact.

Desktops are generally considered to be easier to do a computer upgrade on because they can be opened up for much easier access to the internal components. I suppose that also makes them easier to repair for the same reasons.

But upgrading a laptop is also much easier these days because manufacturers have started making the components that are upgradable, so to speak, much more accessible.

Here we go then, the building blocks of a modern PC.

Case & Power Supply

The case invariably is supplied with the power supply integrated. The purpose of the case is to house all the components and to prevent the PC interfering with assigned broadcast frequencies due to radio frequency interference.

The power supply provides power to the electronic circuits contained within the computer and to the very important ventilation fan that keeps your PC running at a reasonable temperature.

Motherboard

The motherboard is effectively the main printed circuit board that houses all the other PC components and provides interconnection to all the ancillary devices. All user interfaces will connect to the motherboard in addition to, hard drives, DVD drives, USB ports, printer ports, power supply etc.

It is also the communications interface between the processor, memory, hard drive and general user interface components such as the monitor, keyboard and mouse.

Under the control of the processor and via these interconnections, activities such as retrieving data from the hard drive and putting it into the RAM for processing takes place. This is called paging and is why having more RAM can improve the performance of your PC, basically instead of perhaps taking pages of 256MB of data from the hard drive per page you will be able to take maybe 2GB at a time, once the data is in your electronic memory it can be processed at astonishing speed so the more that is in memory the more that can be processed very quickly.

The CPU or central processing unit is the brains of the outfit, it uses the installed operating system to control and use the software programs you have installed on your computer.

It is the speed of this CPU that has the biggest influence on the overall performance of your personal computer. The speed is described in Hz either MHz or GHz and is the number of steps the processor can execute in 1 second, for example a 500Mhz processor can execute 500 million steps in 1 second. What those steps are is a little difficult to define, but from a comparative viewpoint when selecting a PC then faster is better.

It is worth bearing in mind however that all system components need to be compatible, there is no point having a super fast processor if the memory cannot operate at that speed.

DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory)

This is the computer memory called RAM or random access memory. It provides, fast temporary storage from which the CPU draws information that it needs to execute a program and its storage capability is described in either MB (megabytes) or GB (Gigabytes). To optimise the performance of your PC it is best to use the maximum amount of RAM your system can support, but you should be aware that the biggest performance improvement you will see will be as a result of a faster processor not more memory. It does provide an improvement but just not as significant as processor speed.

Hard Drive

Ironically RAM has no memory, as soon as power is removed from the circuit the data the memory was holding is forgotten, hence the reason computers have storage mediums such as hard drives that do retain the data when powered off.

The vast majority of data that is stored in your computer is on the hard drive, this includes the program code for your Operating System plus all the code for any programs you use. Examples are the word processors, spreadsheets or web browsers.

With the advent of digital photography and digital video, which eat up a lot of memory space, hard drives have had to be produced with more and more storage space so more recently storage space is now measured in terms of hundreds of gigagbytes (GB's).Many of the software programs that have been developed are also more memory hungry which further compounds this problem.

An average digital photograph at the time of writing this can easily be 3MB per photograph, roughly 3 million bytes, so you can see how quickly storage space could be used up.

Many people opt to use external storage devices to backup PC information and store non program data to extend the useful life of their PC, and many of these devices are now available that can simply connect and get power via the USB port of the PC so are very easy to use. Another alternative is to use the online storage facilities that are offered by many of the web hosting companies and other online companies.

Sound and video cards

These become more important if you want to use your PC for games or multimedia, i.e. you want your PC to sound and look as good as your TV when you are playing games or watching videos from a DVD player or online. If you are interested in doing this you need to go for high end specification boards that can deliver the quality you are looking for.

What you are considering for video or graphics boards is the speed of processing again but now you need to be looking at 'frame rate' the number of frames per second, how much onboard memory the card has and the number of streams they can deliver.

Sound boards are often built into the mother board now but if you are really interested in improving sound quality you can still get separate sound cards, again look for processing speed, memory and the number of streams some times referred to as 'polyphony'. That is how many independent sound streams the card can produce and mix at one instance.

Digital Video Discs

These are a step up from Compact Discs and have sufficient storage space to record video images and films. It is generally a good idea to purchase a DVD with read and write functionality so that you can burn your video data onto the disc for both portability and to save storage space on your PC.

Network Adapter

Last but not least is the network adapter which has widely replaced the modem as the preferred means of connecting to the Internet, more often than not PC's now have wireless connection through their adapter cards whether they are stand alone or built into the motherboard.

What they do, especially when connected via broadband, is provide a very fast interface to the Internet over what is called a WAN (wide area network).

They can also be used for a LAN (local area network) where you can connect between several computers in your house or, providing it has network capability, a printer or some other peripheral device, effectively you build your own home computer systems.

I almost didn't mention this device because they are pretty much a given when buying a new computer, but the wireless connectivity is a real benefit, no more dragging cables all over the house, fantastic.

One word of warning however if you set up a wireless system make damn sure that you use some sort of encryption, web encrypted protocol is the most common, this will stop outsiders using your network connection or potentially accessing your system.