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Fundamental PC Concepts

Fundamentally, PCs haven’t changed that much in the last decade or two. Sure, you’re now sporting a terabyte of hard disk space and 3GB of RAM, but the core hardware of a machine is basically the same. We are going to dissect different components of a PC and show you how it all works together to produce that fancy computer sitting on your desktop today. For many of you, this will be a review of what you already know but for some of you, you will find components and parts you are unfamiliar with. We understand if you are adept at computer hardware and speed read these sections – don’t skip them outright, there might be a useful exam passing tip here and there.

Storage Devices

Storage devices are hardware which is used to store files and data. This includes floppy disk drives (FDD), hard disk drives (HDD), CD & DVD drives (Optical drives), and all sorts of removable storage – thumb drives, flash drives, SD cards, memory sticks, tape backup drives, USB drives.

In this section, we need to identify what each type of storage is and what characteristics each has.

Floppy Drives

Ok, raise your hand if you have a newer computer with a floppy drive in it? Anyone? Anyone? Ok, maybe a few of you do, but floppy drives are a technology which has gone by the wayside. Several years back, Dell made the decision to cut out floppy drives. The other manufacturers were quick to follow.

There are two primary types of floppy drives that existed in the early years of the PC industry: 3-1/2” and 5-1/4”. If you can find a PC in your company which has a 5-1/4” floppy drive, I give you props – and a recommendation to clean out your old PCs. 5-1/4” floppy drives have been gone from mainstream PCs for a long time and you can rest knowing you won’t be quizzed about them on the CompTIA A+ exam. If they do ask you a question about one, choose E) Has not been sold in a new PC for more than 10 years.

Unfortunately, a few 3-1/2” floppy drives still exist so we have to discuss them here. By the time A+ 2009 comes out, I imagine they will disappear from the exam – like Windows 95 did in the 2006 update.

The images above show a 3-1/2” floppy and a 5-1/4” floppy. The 3-1/2” floppy has a hard outside shell while the 5-1/4” floppy was, well, floppy. In the early days of tech support, the 3-1/2” floppy was often referred to by users as a “hard disk” – because they just didn’t know any better.

Figure 1: 3-1/2" Floppy Drive

Note from the Field: If you have a few floppies still lying around, keep them, they can be very useful. I was consulting with a client the other day who had several old Compaq ProLiant servers. Compaq ProLiants come with a nice setup utility called SmartStart. Due to the age of this equipment, I had to use an older version of SmartStart which required a floppy disk to setup Windows. Guess what I couldn’t find? I ended up rummaging through some boxes in my basement and finding an old driver disk I could reformat for the server setup.