A+ Hardware Service Technician: Computer Hardware, System Boards, and Storage Devices

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Type of Computers

There are four basic types of computers: PC (Personal Computer), Workstations, Laptops, Servers.

The PC, or Personal Computer, is the most common category of computers. This category would include your home PCs and most of your business class PCs.

A workstation is a breed of computer which is a high performance version of the PC. Workstation manufacturers took many of the high speed and high availability components normally found in servers and created a workstation PC which is a high performance version of the original. Throughout the rest of this tutorial, you will find the word PC and the word workstation used interchangeably, while technically there is a difference, we will begin using “workstation” now as a word to describe a PC since the two are in the same basic category.

Laptops are portable computers. Originally, laptops were large, heavy, short battery life beasts. Nowadays, laptops (also referred to as notebooks) are light, powerful, have good battery life, and serve as a desktop replacement for many individuals (including myself).

A server is a machine developed to allow for file or print serving, application hosting, or some other task usually involving many simultaneous connections. Common features of servers include redundancy, multiple drives, large amounts of memory, multiple processors.

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