Mirror Magazine

Mirror Magazine Techno Page By Harendra Alwis

Hard disk drives
The hard disk drive in your system is the ‘data centre’ of the PC. It is here that all of your programmes and data are stored between the occasions that you use the computer. It is somewhat like a library with many bookshelves from which you can take out books to read. There are a few alterations to this analogy, where the shelf would almost always contain an exact copy of the book you take out and you may add or subtract pages of the books before returning them to the shelves - something you wouldn’t do in a real library! Apart from the differences, you will also find out that the hard disk can also be partitioned and divided into many sections and cells.

Your hard disk or disks are the most important of the various types of permanent storage used in PCs (the others being floppy disks, CD-ROMs, tapes, removable drives, etc.) The hard disk differs from the others primarily in three ways: size (usually larger), speed (usually faster) and permanence (usually fixed in the PC and not removable).

Hard disk drives are almost as amazing as microprocessors in terms of the technology they use and how much progress they have made in terms of capacity, speed, and price in the last 20 years. The first PC hard disks had a capacity of 10 megabytes and a cost of over $100 per MB. Modern hard disks have capacities approaching 100 gigabytes at a fraction of that cost to the extent that websites on the Internet such as Yahoo! for example offer you an e-mail of 6 MB, online storage of up to 30 MB, web space of 3MB and a host of other facilities - all at no cost to you!

This represents an improvement of over 1,000,000% in just fewer than 20 years, or around 67% cumulative improvement per year. At the same time, the speed of the hard disk and its interfaces has increased dramatically as well. Your hard disk plays a significant role in the following important aspects of your computer system:

• Performance: The hard disk plays a very important role in overall system performance, probably more than most people recognise (though that is changing now as hard drives get more of the attention they deserve). The speed at which the PC boots up and programmes load is directly related to hard disk speed. The hard disk’s performance is also critical when multitasking is being used or when processing large amounts of data such as graphics work, editing sound and video, or working with databases.

• Storage capacity: This is kind of obvious, but a bigger hard disk lets you store more programmes and data. • Software support: Newer software needs more space and faster hard disks to load it efficiently. It’s easy to remember when 1 GB was a lot of disk space; it’s even easy to remember when 100 MB was a lot of disk space! Now a PC with even 1 GB is considered by many to be ‘crippled’, since it can barely hold modern (inflated) operating system files and a complement of standard business software.

• Reliability: One way to assess the importance of an item of hardware is to consider how much grief is caused if it fails. By this standard, the hard disk is the most important component by a long shot. As I often say, hardware can be replaced, but data cannot. A good quality hard disk, combined with smart maintenance and backup habits, can help ensure that the nightmare of data loss doesn’t become part of your life.

The inner workings of the hard disk will be discussed in the future. We will talk about the internal components in the drive, a look at how data is formatted and stored, a discussion of performance issues, data fragmentation and a full analysis of the two main interfaces used to connect hard disks to the rest of the PC.

Issues such as security and data integrity, guidelines one should follow when using a hard disk, the many confusing issues regarding hard disks and BIOS versions, and support for the newer and larger hard disks currently on the market will follow in the weeks to come. Please keep those e-mails rolling in, and I will do my best to accommodate your suggestions and reply all of you as best as I can. Additional source of information: pctechguide.com

Microsoft Office 2003 due
Microsoft has taken the wraps off its Office 2003 software, which features a number of enhancements to the dominant business application that the company now has dubbed Microsoft Office System.

The software giant said Office 2003 should be on the shelves by October 21st, and that some equipment makers will begin shipping machines with the software by the end of September, although those dates could be overly optimistic.

Included in the System product are new versions of popular Microsoft Office programs for businesses - such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook - as well as three new programmes: InfoPath with support for XML-based documents; Live Communications Server; and OneNote for digital note-taking on Tablet PCs.

A redesign of Outlook features junk mail filters to put the lid on spam, and a tool called “the Research Task Pane” enables faster access to data. See http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/22127.html for more details

Overview of the functions of the Motherboard
• Organisation: In one way or another, everything is eventually connected to the motherboard. The way that the motherboard is designed and laid out dictates how the entire computer is going to be organised.

• Control: The motherboard contains the chipset and BIOS programme, which between them control most of the data flow within the computer. • Communication: Almost all communication between the PC and its peripherals, other PCs, and you, the user, goes through the motherboard.

• Processor support: The motherboard dictates directly your choice of processor for use in the system.

• Peripheral support: The motherboard determines, in large part, what types of peripherals you can use in your PC. For example, the type of video card your system will use (ISA, PCI...) is dependent on what system buses your motherboard uses.

• Performance: The motherboard is a major determining factor in your system’s performance, for two main reasons. First and foremost, the motherboard determines what types of processors, memory, system buses, and hard disk interface speed your system can have, and these components dictate directly your system’s performance. Second, the quality of the motherboard circuitry and chipset themselves have an impact on performance.

• Upgradeability: The capabilities of your motherboard dictate to what extent you will be able to upgrade your machine. For example, there are some motherboards that will accept Pentium 4’s of up to 1.6 GHz speed only, while others will go to 2.4 GHz. Obviously, the second one will give you more room to upgrade if you are starting with a 1.6 GHz Pentium 4.

Improve your computer literacy
• Proximity operator - A type of operator used by some search engines to improve search constraints by instructing the search to look for words that are within a short distance of each other in a document. For example, using a search engine that supports proximity operators, querying the phrase “cable NEAR modem” will instruct the search engine to look in documents for instances of the words “cable” and “modem” that are near each other. Different search engines will specify different distances that the words must be within.

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