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Video dispalys

Video displays

The display is what lets you see what your doing. Doesn’t do you much good if you trying to install updates but can’t see what your doing so end up turning the computer off every time. Some if of the first displays to be used is something called CRT or a cathode ray tube if you google that and see what the inside of a CRT looks like you’re going to see a tube as the name implies don’t touch it even if it is unplugged it can still hold electricity enough electricity to kill you as one can imagine you don’t want that. No to fix that they’re going to be button somewhere on the CRT to ‘shoot’ the electricity, so it doesn’t kill you if you every must replace the tube. With that said it is still highly recommended to be careful and still don’t touch if it’s determined that the tube must be replaced, I would just recommend getting a new monitor don’t risk it, now that we got that covered, Onto something else.

 Next we have refresh rate. This means how often the screen shows you what’s going on and how fast it does it. Note that the monitor doesn’t set the refresh rate that’s done by the video card does the monitor just sets the refresh rate to what the video card sends up. CRT’s have three guns that shoot colors at the screen to make what you see, one gun for red, one for blue, one for green, then there a focusing “tunnel” of sorts which combines the colors to get the actual colors you want displayed. Next is something called resolution now all monitors have this not just CRT’s, what resolution is how much detail something has, what it will look like what is being displayed, and how many pixels are being displayed horizontally and vertically. The higher the resolution the more pixels the screen shows. Next and now the most common type if display today is called the LCD display or a liquid crystal display. It basically changes (the crystals) to match the orientation of the light being projected on it. LCD’s also have something called a film transistor which unlike others that use X and Y wires it uses one or more tiny transistors that control each color dot that make the faster picture display the higher definition and tighter control than passive or duel screen technologies could ever do. Let’s talk about the components of an LCD you have the LCD panel itself, the logic board, backlights, inverters, transformer, and an analog to digital converter. Just like computers monitors don’t like inconsistent power nice steady power is what the require. LCD’s also use different types of lighting to make the monitors work some emit lights from the sides of the screen some light up from the back of the display (which I would argue is better cause you don’t have to worry about light trying to travel as far to light up the rest of the screen.) That was just the surface into the world of displays and video adapters.

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trouble shooting windows

                                     Trouble shooting windows

                                        Windows failing to boot either a black screen with nothing happening or just a loop that doesn’t result with you ending up at the login in screen. Sometimes this can be fixed by just turning off and turning back on again or even a reseating of a physical connecter. Now if you get something that says NTLDR or BOOTMGR is missing you’re in another going to be in a world of hurt and is going to be tricky to recover from. But before all that lets talk about some basic trouble shoot9ing steps its always a good idea to start with the simple ones before clawing your hair out and not sleeping. (do get plenty of sleep please) Is the computer plugged in is it getting power. Does something smell weird sometimes power can get hot and start to melt things and possibly cause a fire. If that’s not the case and nothing has burnt down next it is time to go on to some different physical options or possibly some configuration. Sometimes your cmos battery will die and if that dies your boot order will be reset. Sometimes if you are doing some overclocking other settings might get changed that includes the boot order so ask questions, questions are your best friend when it comes to diagnosing issues.

                                       When ever you install an OS theirs going to be a small partition that’s gets made at installation you can use this and see if it fixes the booting issue. Then next thing you can do is attempt to restore to a previous point sometimes this might work if say you installed a program your system didn’t like and you can’t boot go into safe mode go to previous restore point and your problem should be solved. If for whatever reason your faced with a full rebuild what you can do is reinstall windows onto if the current one with out loosening all of your files, though with that said your best bet would be to swap out the C drive for a clean one and send the old drive to a data recovery company and get the data off that way. Going back to that recovery partition from before you typically need an install disk for that to work so depending on the version of windows (windows vista and beyond) you will have something called start up repair. What this basically does is when the computer starts up it will run a quick diagnostic and see if it can fix the problem and let you boot. Something this process does it will try to go back to a previous restore point like we mentioned earlier or restore critical drivers or perhaps even older version. That is because there is a chance that a new driver or update cause something to go wrong. If it works or if it doesn’t after the process is complete it will make a report in a text document and save it for you to look at later should the need arise.

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NTFS users and froups

 NTFS, users and groups

                                                  Today where gonna talk about NTFS, users and groups. To start with when you use a computer ther are accounts and each accounts is encrypted. Depending on the version of windows of windows the tools you have for managing different users will vary, but well comeback to that. Lets talk about passwords first, ther just what you’d expect you need them to access a resource. For a hacker getting into the computer by whatever means they have at ther dissposial is the first part of what they have to do. Never under any circumstances give out your passwords. If you or someone forgets what ther password have an administrator reset it. Then you reset the password to something complex meaning a comination of letters and numbers, make some of them uppcase include some sysmbols in it. Now often you will be asked to provide some security questions. These can be used for if your signing in on a different device to prove that its actually you doing the act or as a confortion if it’s you doing the password reset. Some common passwords are ones name and then 123 afterwards (Ben123) very guessable. Obvisly it is reccmoneded that you make your passwords guessable.

                 Now where gonna get in to groups, you can assign certain people to groups. When you do that you can assign certain levels or restrict levels of access to certain people. Some reason you might do this is cause a general secretary or the front door recipsisnt doesn’t need access to the company payroll or and human resources assets. Most version of windows have the same basic groups, Incorpated in them, administators, powerusers, users, everyone, guests. For the most part some of these groups are similar. Even admistraoers don’t have imidiete access to all the files they want if the need access to something they don’t have they can go through a process take control. They might do this if say another administrator got let go but you need to accces to resources only they had and you take over the old administatros resources until a new one gets hired you can do that. Just like you have different accounts and groups you have different levels of ownership. First you regular ownership meaning the person who makes the folder has complete control can do whatever they want to the files in the folder. Next you have what we taslked about a little bit ago take ownership. To go along with the different levels of ownerships you have permissions to go along with it. Those are change permissinos with this you can give or revoke access and even change the level of access to the resource kind of like a administrative abilities to a degree. Next you have folder permissions those  are permissons for everything inside the folder in some cases they can even override system and account permissions. Next you have some what im gonna call options assocatied with these folder and file fullcontroll, as it sounds you have full control you can do what you want. Nexzt we have modifyyou can do everything like full control except you cant delete files. Read and execute, lets you see the contents of the folder and the files inside. After that you have list folder content it’s practically the same as read and execute but this option is inherited by the folder. Read is you can only read the files in a folder can’t right to it or modify anything in it. Write gives you the ability to write to folder and files.

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removable media

                                                                               Removable media

                  Today where going to talk about removable media. There is all kinds of removable media and while its best to know all of them there is a couple of them that are more prominent then others. Some of them are flash drives, external hard drives, while it is a bit old even floppy drive are just some of them out there.

                 Let’s start with flash drivers if you know about SSD’s flash drives are kind of similar in the fact that they both use flash memory to store they data they hold. Theirs a couple big differences the amount of storage, the interface it uses to connect to the system, the speed at which it accepts and transfers the data, and arguably the biggest point is that its nonvolatile. That makes it great if I might say. Next are flash cards otherwise known as “SD cards” just like flash drives they come SD cards come in many different shapes and sizes, the primary purpose for these cards if or cameras and recorders. The size changes accordingly to the device it goes to, say for a semi professional movie studio they might use the full fledge sized of SD cards as to where a consumer-oriented camera might use the either a full fledged or mini SD cards, and say a phone or a low-end camera or voice recorder would use a micro SD card. Now any of these cards come in a variety of sizes. It varies but the smallest sizes went form 256kb to 512 GB there a very use form of storage media.

                 Now once the data is on these cards you got to take it off which is why there called removable media, that is where card readers come in. Card readers take the information on the SD cards which everyone it is as long as it is compatible it will read the data and move it to system you’re on and you can do whatever you like with the data. Then your free to keep the data on the cards or erase it and reuse it whatever you would like to do.

                 Next, we move on CD’s the media that’s not really used anymore today or at least not as much as it was say 10 to 20 years ago and earlier. Just like SD cards CD’s come in different capacities though unlike SD’s cards Cd’s only come in one size from there very inception. You have different types of CD’s CD-R, CD-RW. CD-R m

eans CD-writable meaning you can write data on to this disc but once you do you cannot right data on it again a one and done type deal. Next you have CD-RW meaning CD-re writable, unlike the CD-R you can rewrite data on this disc for as long as the disc will last. The type of data you can put on all of these removable media is only limited to amount the media can hold and if the media supports the type of data you want to put on it

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Maintaing windows

                                                                 Maintain windows

                  Today where going to talk about maintain your install of windows and optimizing at the same time, well come back to that. There first thing you should do after you finished installing windows is update it. These updates will do a couple of things first it will provide security updates performance improvements and even new features. Trust me it is worth updating that and it stopes those prompts from windows telling you to update. Sometimes instead of doing multiple updates constantly there will be something called a service pack which gives you multiple updates at once. Theirs a couple ways you can do updates one way is to let windows install everything, another way is to chews which updates you want installed, or let windows download the updates but you get to choose to which ones get installed.

                 First let’s discuss about security updates. In the online world you need security if you don’t have it you’re going to be in a world of trouble. Over time as a program or in this case a operating system bugs or holes in the security will pop up and they need to be filled maybe it’s a certain key combo that can be used to restart the system. On a side note that’s what CRTL ALT DELETE was originally meant to be used for, that aside back to subject at hand. There could be glitch where if you type something in a search bar restart your computer the next day and the computer thinks that’s the password you have set for it when that is not the case

                 The next kind of update is performance update. There is only so much testing a company can do before they released a product cause they have to make some money so over time as time goes by the developers get more familiar with the software and they can change somethings around so they can get more preference out the software. These updates in most cases always make the user experience better because no one likes a slow machine you get frustrated work doesn’t get done in a timely manner and these updates can help with that.

                 Those two are the main types of dates ther are a couple of others but those are the main ones your going to see and work with the most. Now let’s talk about how you would go about updating said software, it used to be for windows Xp and a little bit before you would go to a web page and download them from the web page. This changed with the introduction of windows vista yes the dark spot of windows past in this version you get instead of a webpage you get something called and surprise to now one windows update in the control panel. I find this better then a webpage now I’m not that old so I never had to do that but, I can say I firmly believe that was a good move on microsoft’s part.

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Hard drives and Solid state drives

Hard Drives

                 Weather is the document you wrote for your college course that you should have written a month ago or that funny YouTube video you saw that had a ending that made you laugh your lungs out. All of that is data and that data needs to be stored some where for later use. You have a couple of drivers today but where going to focus on two main types the standard hard drive and solid state drive we’ll come back to the latter later. Where going to focus on hard drives for now.

                 Where going to start by analyzing the structure of the hard drive and its components, if you look inside one you’re going to find a couple of things, the first thing you’re going to notice is a bunch of disks. They’ll look like ordinarily cd’s but there not. Next thing you’re going to notice is some pieces of metal going across the disks those are actuator arms when you access a piece of data or send data to the drive the data needs to get to the drive some how and those arms do just that. Now the arms themselves don’t move that’s where the drive motor comes in the motor is what moves the arms and the disks aka platers. It does that so you can store data all over the drive otherwise you would run out of space very quickly. Hard drives with physical parts do move and the speed they spin is determined by the rpm’s, some of those speeds and these are the common ones, are 5400, 7200, 10,000 15,000. The higher the speeds the faster the drive is.

                 Next, we have what’s called the solid-state drives as the name suggests there solid bad joke I know. Anyway, unlike the hard drive these drives don’t have any moving parts so there a lot more durable. Now that doesn’t mean you can go troughing these against a wall don’t do that. These drives are a lot faster then standard hard drive, they work at the same speed from the day there made to the day they die, but there is draw back to using them the capacities are not the greatest they tend to be smaller the regular drives. The reason they perform so much better is because they use something called flash and flash is lighting fast (pun intended get it) but the can only last for so long depending on the quality of the flash determines the amount of “writes and reads” it can do before giving up the ghost. So a common technique that’s used even today its still use is use a SSD for your boot drive and some commonly used programs (i.e. web browser , anti-virus program, email client maybe) and that is about it, and use a hard drive for everything since there usually bigger and cheaper The storage of these drives and hard rivers have steadily increased from their inception from a couple of kilobytes to terabytes of today. Some drives are so big that you can hold hundreds of thousands of pictures or hundreds of videos. That was just a basic overview of drives that are used in computers there some other types like NVME, M.2 but those are another kettle of fish requiring a discussion in and of its self.

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About Bios

                                                  Bios

Today where gonna talk about the BIOS or the basic input output system. If you don’t have  bios your computer as basically just a giant 50 pound paper weight. In a similar to how you need drivers for hardware to communicate with the CPU you need a bios so the computer can communicate with the rest of system. Thers a couple components to the bios one of them is the North Bridge and the South Bridge but we’ll come back to those later.

                 The Bios is typically stored on Rom chip. Rom or “read only memory”, ther are two types of rom’s the regular, and flash rom which is non viotaile. For the first type of rom once you right a program on it that’s it, one and done you can’t wright anything else on it. Now newer computers have a type of rom that’s flashable meaning you can update it for new features bug updates. Next we have the cmos it is just is just as important as the bios. The other way this can be interrupted is a POST or power on self test. It tests the system’s hardware to see if it works before booting. You can also make some changes inside the cmos program depending on which one you have and how modern you want to get what can you play with changes. But even with todays bios/cmos they’ll have some basics defaults if you will.

                 Next we have POST cards remember that power on self test from earlier unless you know beep codes if you get any at all, your gonna have a hard time dignoiseing a problem. If you get a post card itll give you a code that you can assioate  with the a problem, some codes are universal from old hardware to new hardware, but you can always look up these codes and what they mean its a lot easier then trying to figger out all those different beep codes and other diagnostic tools. The reason is that because you have one code that means one thing and that narrows down the problem and gives possible solutions.

                 Computers need power inorder to function with out youd have what I said in the beging, now when the computer is turned off or even unplugged where does the computer get its power to retain the settings you have put into place. That source is battary’s otherwise known as the cmos battery creative name I know. If this battery is taken out then the cmos has no power and cant retain the data that it has and reverts to the default.

 That was just a broad over view of the Bios, now a days we have something called the Uefi it’s a far more advanced version of the Basic input output system. But you should not need to know this  for the test but since the ufei is in most modern computers these days it doesn’t hurt to know a thing a to about it.

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About Ram

Today where going to talk about Ram or double data rate. In a nutshell ram is whatever your using is currently stored. Now all Ram is notched unique to each version DDR, DDR2, DDR3, DDR4. So, meaning DDR won’t work in a DDr2 slot and, DDR2 won’t work in a DDRR3 slot, and DDR3 won’t work a DDR4 slot so on and so on. Each ram has its own speed and name specifications usually on a sticker label on the front of the module. You need ram in order for your computer to post and boot. If you don’t have any in the system or for whatever reason say it’s not seated right or all the modules are dead you get a beep code, along the lines something like beep beep beep beep. Four beeps total two beeps in quick session a small pause and then another set of two beeps. Now generally unless you using ECC ram all you have to do is find a kit appropriate to the slots on your board and your good to go. Ther are couple exceptions though you can combine different kits and individual ram modules, but if you do that it won’t be able to run in duel channel mode, triple channel, or quad channel mode. As long as the ram works and the board picks the modules up you get the total capacity of those said modules.

             Now on to ECC or error correcting code memory. The only ones that use this kind of ram is the enterprise environment. As the name suggests it can correct errors that could happen in memory, here’s an example if your typing a word document or doing something in Microsoft paint something happens in memory since this is what where talking about now what you did is gone. If you were using ECC memory it would have “corrected” that error and nothing would have happened. Now just like earlier the enterprise environment is the one that has the most sue and mostly that uses it. The YouTube video that you watch the songs you download from the variety of music services; all those services need as much uptime as possible otherwise customers won’t be happy that the stuff they pay for in the case of music streaming services to be down. They made the decision to spend the extra on money on that type of ram, because ECC ram is way more expensive rather than have whatever it is the machine is doing go down and possibly lose more money than if they just got the ECC ram in the first place.

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