Answer Description

ECC Memory is "Error Correction Code Memory." This memory can detect and fix errors in your memory.

Wikipedia

Error correction code memory (ECC memory) is a type of computer data storage that uses an error correction code (ECC) to detect and correct n-bit data corruption which occurs in memory. ECC memory is used in most computers where data corruption cannot be tolerated, like industrial control applications, critical databases, and infrastructural memory caches. Typically, ECC memory maintains a memory system immune to single-bit errors: the data that is read from each word is always the same as the data that had been written to it, even if one of the bits actually stored has been flipped to the wrong state. Most non-ECC memory cannot detect errors, although some non-ECC memory with parity support allows detection but not correction.

Answer Description

A gaming computer will need a good graphics card, in order to generate the graphics used in modern games.

Wikipedia

A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics adapter, or display adapter) is an expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display device (such as a computer monitor) Frequently, these are advertised as discrete or dedicated graphics cards, emphasizing the distinction between these and integrated graphics At the core of both is the graphics processing unit (GPU), which is the main part that does the actual computations, but should not be confused with the graphics card as a whole, although "GPU" is often used as a metonymic shorthand to refer to graphics cards

Answer Description

A laptop's hard drive, optical drive, and RAM can all be easily replaced by an average person with little to no training. However, the motherboard will require a professional to replace.

Wikipedia

A motherboard (also called mainboard, main circuit board, MB, mboard, backplane board, base board, system board, mobo; or in Apple computers logic board) is the main printed circuit board (PCB) in general-purpose computers and other expandable systems. It holds and allows communication between many of the crucial electronic components of a system, such as the central processing unit (CPU) and memory, and provides connectors for other peripherals. Unlike a backplane, a motherboard usually contains significant sub-systems, such as the central processor, the chipset's input/output and memory controllers, interface connectors, and other components integrated for general use. Motherboard means specifically a PCB with expansion capabilities. As the name suggests, this board is often referred to as the "mother" of all components attached to it, which often include peripherals, interface cards, and daughterboards: sound cards, video cards, network cards, host bus adapters, TV tuner cards, IEEE 1394 cards, and a variety of other custom components. Similarly, the term mainboard describes a device with a single board and no additional expansions or capability, such as controlling boards in laser printers, television sets, washing machines, mobile phones, and other embedded systems with limited expansion abilities.

Answer Description

You will need drivers, which will allow your operating system and hardware to communicate together.

Wikipedia

In computing, a device driver is a computer program that operates or controls a particular type of device that is attached to a computer or automaton. A driver provides a software interface to hardware devices, enabling operating systems and other computer programs to access hardware functions without needing to know precise details about the hardware being used. A driver communicates with the device through the computer bus or communications subsystem to which the hardware connects. When a calling program invokes a routine in the driver, the driver issues commands to the device (drives it). Once the device sends data back to the driver, the driver may invoke routines in the original calling program. Drivers are hardware dependent and operating-system-specific. They usually provide the interrupt handling required for any necessary asynchronous time-dependent hardware interface.

Answer Description

Fiber uses light, which can travel much farther and faster than electricity. Fiber can go miles, depending on the exact type. While CAT can travel 100 meters, and USB can travel 3 meters.

Wikipedia

An optical fiber, or optical fibre in Commonwealth English, is a flexible, transparent fiber made by drawing glass (silica) or plastic to a diameter slightly thicker than that of a human hair. Optical fibers are used most often as a means to transmit light between the two ends of the fiber and find wide usage in fiber-optic communications, where they permit transmission over longer distances and at higher bandwidths (data transfer rates) than electrical cables. Fibers are used instead of metal wires because signals travel along them with less loss; in addition, fibers are immune to electromagnetic interference, a problem from which metal wires suffer. Fibers are also used for illumination and imaging, and are often wrapped in bundles so they may be used to carry light into, or images out of confined spaces, as in the case of a fiberscope. Specially designed fibers are also used for a variety of other applications, some of them being fiber optic sensors and fiber lasers.Optical fibers typically include a core surrounded by a transparent cladding material with a lower index of refraction. Light is kept in the core by the phenomenon of total internal reflection which causes the fiber to act as a waveguide. Fibers that support many propagation paths or transverse modes are called multi-mode fibers, while those that support a single mode are called single-mode fibers (SMF). Multi-mode fibers generally have a wider core diameter and are used for short-distance communication links and for applications where high power must be

Answer Description

A local area network (LAN) is a computer network that interconnects computers in a limited area such as a home, school, computer laboratory, or office building using network media.

Wikipedia

A local area network (LAN) is a computer network that interconnects computers within a limited area such as a residence, school, laboratory, university campus or office building. By contrast, a wide area network (WAN) not only covers a larger geographic distance, but also generally involves leased telecommunication circuits. Ethernet and Wi-Fi are the two most common technologies in use for local area networks. Historical network technologies include ARCNET, Token Ring and AppleTalk.

Answer Description

The chain of custody will be used in court to prove that the computer's information was not changed while stored.

Wikipedia

Chain of custody (CoC), in legal contexts, is the chronological documentation or paper trail that records the sequence of custody, control, transfer, analysis, and disposition of materials, including physical or electronic evidence. Of particular importance in criminal cases, the concept is also applied in civil litigation and more broadly in drug testing of athletes and in supply chain management, e.g. to improve the traceability of food products, or to provide assurances that wood products originate from sustainably managed forests. It is often a tedious process that has been required for evidence to be shown legally in court. Now, however, with new portable technology that allows accurate laboratory quality results from the scene of the crime, the chain of custody is often much shorter which means evidence can be processed for court much faster. The term is also sometimes used in the fields of history, art history, and archives as a synonym for provenance (meaning the chronology of the ownership, custody or location of a historical object, document or group of documents), which may be an important factor in determining authenticity.

Answer Description

DVI, which stands for Digital Visual Interface, is a digital interface used to connect a monitor to a PC

Wikipedia

Digital Visual Interface (DVI) is a video display interface developed by the Digital Display Working Group (DDWG). The digital interface is used to connect a video source, such as a video display controller, to a display device, such as a computer monitor. It was developed with the intention of creating an industry standard for the transfer of uncompressed digital video content. Featuring support for analog connections, DVI devices manufactured as DVI-I are compatible with the analog VGA interface by including VGA pins, while DVI-D devices are digital-only. This compatibility, along with other advantages, led to its widespread acceptance over competing digital display standards Plug and Display (P&D) and Digital Flat Panel (DFP). Although DVI is predominantly associated with computers, it is sometimes used in other consumer electronics such as television sets and DVD players.

Answer Description

The backlight is what provides illumination for an LCD laptop screen, it is likely that it is failing.

Wikipedia

A backlight is a form of illumination used in liquid-crystal displays (LCDs). As LCDs do not produce light by themselves—unlike, for example, cathode ray tube (CRT), plasma (PDP) or OLED displays—they need illumination (ambient light or a special light source) to produce a visible image. Backlights illuminate the LCD from the side or back of the display panel, unlike frontlights, which are placed in front of the LCD. Backlights are used in small displays to increase readability in low light conditions such as in wristwatches, and are used in smart phones, computer displays and LCD televisions to produce light in a manner similar to a CRT display. A review of some early backlighting schemes for LCDs is given in a report Engineering and Technology History by Peter J. Wild.Simple types of LCDs such as in pocket calculators are built without an internal light source, requiring external light sources to convey the display image to the user. Most LCD screens, however, are built with an internal light source. Such screens consist of several layers. The backlight is usually the first layer from the back. Light valves then vary the amount of light reaching the eye, by blocking its passage in some way. Most use a fixed polarizing filter and a switching one, to block the undesired light.

Answer Description

Cable internet is the fastest out of the four.

Wikipedia

In telecommunications, cable Internet access, shortened to cable Internet, is a form of broadband Internet access which uses the same infrastructure as cable television. Like digital subscriber line and fiber to the premises services, cable Internet access provides network edge connectivity (last mile access) from the Internet service provider to an end user. It is integrated into the cable television infrastructure analogously to DSL which uses the existing telephone network. Cable TV networks and telecommunications networks are the two predominant forms of residential Internet access. Recently, both have seen increased competition from fiber deployments, wireless, and mobile networks.

Answer Description

PCIe x16 is the best choice to house a graphics card, because PCIe x16 can operate at speeds of 128Gbit/s.

Wikipedia

PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus standards. It is the common motherboard interface for personal computers' graphics cards, sound cards, hard disk drive host adapters, SSDs, Wi-Fi and Ethernet hardware connections. PCIe has numerous improvements over the older standards, including higher maximum system bus throughput, lower I/O pin count and smaller physical footprint, better performance scaling for bus devices, a more detailed error detection and reporting mechanism (Advanced Error Reporting, AER), and native hot-swap functionality. More recent revisions of the PCIe standard provide hardware support for I/O virtualization. The PCI Express electrical interface is measured by the number of simultaneous lanes. (A lane is a single send/receive line of data. The analogy is a highway with traffic in both directions.) The interface is also used in a variety of other standards — most notably the laptop expansion card interface called ExpressCard. It is also used in the storage interfaces of SATA Express, U.2 (SFF-8639) and M.2. Format specifications are maintained and developed by the PCI-SIG (PCI Special Interest Group) — a group of more than 900 companies that also maintains the conventional PCI specifications.

Answer Description

All the memory does not have to match, but each slot must match its pair. Meaning both black must match, and both blue must match, but the black and blue slots do not need to match eachother.

Answer Description

Laptop designs often make it difficult to upgrade or change components like video cards, processors and motherboards. RAM and Hard drives are typically easily accessible and cost effective to upgrade in a laptop.

Wikipedia

Random-access memory (RAM; ) is a form of computer memory that can be read and changed in any order, typically used to store working data and machine code. A random-access memory device allows data items to be read or written in almost the same amount of time irrespective of the physical location of data inside the memory, in contrast with other direct-access data storage media (such as hard disks, CD-RWs, DVD-RWs and the older magnetic tapes and drum memory), where the time required to read and write data items varies significantly depending on their physical locations on the recording medium, due to mechanical limitations such as media rotation speeds and arm movement. RAM contains multiplexing and demultiplexing circuitry, to connect the data lines to the addressed storage for reading or writing the entry. Usually more than one bit of storage is accessed by the same address, and RAM devices often have multiple data lines and are said to be "8-bit" or "16-bit", etc. devices.In today's technology, random-access memory takes the form of integrated circuit (IC) chips with MOS (metal–oxide–semiconductor) memory cells. RAM is normally associated with volatile types of memory where stored information is lost if power is removed. The two main types of volatile random-access semiconductor memory are static random-access memory (SRAM) and dynamic random-access memory (DRAM). Non-volatile RAM has also been developed and other types of non-volatile memories allow random access for read operations, but either do not allow write operations or have other kinds of limitations on

Answer Description

PCIe, or PCI-Express, comes in x1, x4, x8, x16, x32 speeds.

Wikipedia

PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus standards. It is the common motherboard interface for personal computers' graphics cards, sound cards, hard disk drive host adapters, SSDs, Wi-Fi and Ethernet hardware connections. PCIe has numerous improvements over the older standards, including higher maximum system bus throughput, lower I/O pin count and smaller physical footprint, better performance scaling for bus devices, a more detailed error detection and reporting mechanism (Advanced Error Reporting, AER), and native hot-swap functionality. More recent revisions of the PCIe standard provide hardware support for I/O virtualization. The PCI Express electrical interface is measured by the number of simultaneous lanes. (A lane is a single send/receive line of data. The analogy is a highway with traffic in both directions.) The interface is also used in a variety of other standards — most notably the laptop expansion card interface called ExpressCard. It is also used in the storage interfaces of SATA Express, U.2 (SFF-8639) and M.2. Format specifications are maintained and developed by the PCI-SIG (PCI Special Interest Group) — a group of more than 900 companies that also maintains the conventional PCI specifications.

Answer Description

Category 5 ethernet has a max transmission speed of 100Mbp/s.

Wikipedia

Category 5 cable (Cat 5) is a twisted pair cable for computer networks. Since 2001, the variant commonly in use is the Category 5e specification (Cat 5e). The cable standard provides performance of up to 100 MHz and is suitable for most varieties of Ethernet over twisted pair up to 2.5GBASE-T but more commonly runs at 1000BASE-T (Gigabit Ethernet) speeds. Cat 5 is also used to carry other signals such as telephone and video. This cable is commonly connected using punch-down blocks and modular connectors. Most Category 5 cables are unshielded, relying on the balanced line twisted pair design and differential signaling for noise rejection.

Answer Description

A USB Drive is the only device or component that can be used as a boot device. FDISK refers to the command line tool and a Floppy Disk.

Wikipedia

USB drive may refer to: A USB flash drive or "thumb drive", a USB-connected computer storage using semiconductor non-volatile random-access memory A USB external drive, a hard drive fitted with a USB interface Secure Digital, a non-volatile memory card format CompactFlash, a flash memory mass storage device Memory Stick, a removable flash memory card format

Answer Description

A Wide-Area-Network (WAN) is a series of smaller networks that are linked together to form a single, large network. Metropolitan Area Networks (MAN) are very similar to WANs, but are geographically smaller and typically used by city governments and universities.

Wikipedia

A wide area network (WAN) is a telecommunications network that extends over a large geographic area for the primary purpose of computer networking Wide area networks are often established with leased telecommunication circuitsBusinesses, as well as schools and government entities, use wide area networks to relay data to staff, students, clients, buyers and suppliers from various locations across the world In essence, this mode of telecommunication allows a business to effectively carry out its daily function regardless of location The Internet may be considered a WAN

Answer Description

LCD screens use a backlight to illuminate the screen's display. A plasma lamp is the coolest toy at the Discovery Center. Seriously, Google it.

Wikipedia

A liquid-crystal display (LCD) is a flat-panel display or other electronically modulated optical device that uses the light-modulating properties of liquid crystals combined with polarizers Liquid crystals do not emit light directly, instead using a backlight or reflector to produce images in color or monochrome LCDs are available to display arbitrary images (as in a general-purpose computer display) or fixed images with low information content, which can be displayed or hidden For instance: preset words, digits, and seven-segment displays, as in a digital clock, are all good examples of devices with these displays They use the same basic technology, except that arbitrary images are made from a matrix of small pixels, while other displays have larger elements

Answer Description

HDDs or Hard Disk Drives are the older, magnetic disk storage devices that can and will become fragmented with use. SSD, NV Memory, and Flash are actually the same technology and do not become fragmented.

Wikipedia

A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk, is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnetic material. The platters are paired with magnetic heads, usually arranged on a moving actuator arm, which read and write data to the platter surfaces. Data is accessed in a random-access manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored and retrieved in any order. HDDs are a type of non-volatile storage, retaining stored data when powered off. Modern HDDs are typically in the form of a small rectangular box. Introduced by IBM in 1956, HDDs were the dominant secondary storage device for general-purpose computers beginning in the early 1960s. HDDs maintained this position into the modern era of servers and personal computers, though personal computing devices produced in large volume, like mobile phones and tablets, rely on flash memory storage devices. More than 224 companies have produced HDDs historically, though after extensive industry consolidation most units are manufactured by Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital. HDDs dominate the volume of storage produced (exabytes per year) for servers. Though production is growing slowly (by exabytes shipped), sales revenues and unit shipments are declining because solid-state drives (SSDs) have higher data-transfer rates, higher areal storage density, somewhat better reliability, and much lower latency and access times.The revenues for SSDs, most of which use NAND flash memory, slightly exceeded those for HDDs in 2018. Flash storage

Answer Description

The laptop is unplugged, so now you need to remove it's backup power source, the battery.

Wikipedia

A laptop computer or notebook computer, also known as a laptop or notebook for short, is a small, portable personal computer (PC). Laptops typically have a clamshell form factor with a flat panel screen (usually 11–17 in or 280–430 mm in diagonal size) on the inside of the upper lid and an alphanumeric keyboard and pointing device (such as a trackpad and/or trackpoint) on the inside of the lower lid, although 2-in-1 PCs with a detachable keyboard are often marketed as laptops or as having a "laptop mode". Most of the computer's internal hardware is fitted inside the lower lid enclosure under the keyboard, although many laptops have a built-in webcam at the top of the screen and some modern ones even feature a touch-screen display. In most cases, unlike tablet computers which run on mobile operating systems, laptops tend to run on desktop operating systems which have been traditionally associated with desktop computers. Laptops run on both an AC power supply and a rechargeable battery pack and can be folded shut for convenient storage and transportation, making them suitable for mobile use. Today, laptops are used in a variety of settings, such as at work (especially on business trips), in education, for playing games, web browsing, for personal multimedia, and for general home computer use. The names "laptop" and "notebook" refer to the fact that the computer can be practically placed on (or on top of) the user's lap and can be used similarly to a notebook. As of 2022, in American English,