Answer Description

The most likely cause is that their iOS devices are simply too old to support Near Field Communication (NFC) which is required for Apple pay (and Android pay for Android devices). NFC support started in iPhone 6 devices and is generally available in all newer models. Apple pay does not require a cell or WiFi signal.

Wikipedia

Near-Field Communication (NFC) is a set of communication protocols for communication between two electronic devices over a distance of 4 cm (11⁄2 in) or less NFC offers a low-speed connection with simple setup that can be used to bootstrap more-capable wireless connectionsNFC devices can act as electronic identity documents and keycards They are used in contactless payment systems and allow mobile payment replacing or supplementing systems such as credit cards and electronic ticket smart cards This is sometimes called NFC/CTLS or CTLS NFC, with contactless abbreviated CTLS NFC can be used for sharing small files such as contacts, and bootstrapping fast connections to share larger media such as photos, videos, and other files

Answer Description

Dual Data Rate (DDR) 3 Small Outline Dual Inline Memory Module (SO-DIMM) uses 204 pins. DDR and DDR2 pin counts can have 100, 144 or 200 pins. DDR4 SO-DIM uses 260 pins. SO-DIMM RAM is primarily used in laptops and other small devices.

Wikipedia

A SO-DIMM (pronounced "so-dimm" , also spelled "SODIMM") or small outline DIMM, is a type of computer memory built using integrated circuits. A SO-DIMM is a smaller alternative to a DIMM, being roughly half the physical size of a regular DIMM. SO-DIMMs are often used in systems that have limited space, which include laptops, notebooks, small-footprint personal computers such as those based on Nano-ITX motherboards, high-end upgradable office printers, and networking hardware such as routers and NAS devices. They are usually available with the same size data path and speed ratings of the regular DIMMs though normally with smaller capacities.

Answer Description

LCD, LED & OLED are common screen types that support multiple colors. E Ink screens are used for eReaders and support only black & white.

Wikipedia

E Ink (electronic ink) is a brand of electronic paper (e-paper) display technology commercialized by the E Ink Corporation, which was co-founded in 1997 by MIT undergraduates JD Albert and Barrett Comiskey, MIT Media Lab professor Joseph Jacobson, Jerome Rubin and Russ Wilcox.It is available in grayscale and color and is used in mobile devices such as e-readers, digital signage, smartwatches, mobile phones, electronic shelf labels and architecture panels.

Answer Description

RJ-11 connectors are used with 4 copper based cables (2 pairs). Typically used with telephones and does not use fiber-optic cabling or coaxial cabling.

Answer Description

A Dual/Double Layer DVD holds 8.5 GB of data. Depending on who you ask, 8.5GB is either 8500 MB (8.5 * 1000) or 8704 MB (5.5 * 1024). The official size of a gigabyte is 1000 MB and a gibibyte is 1024 MB. This was not always the case, causing the confusion over 1000 vs 1024 megabytes to a gigabyte. You should be aware that both could be true depending on the vendor and technology being used.

Wikipedia

Answer Description

The CMOS battery (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) is a small battery that provides power to a motherboard while it is powered off. This power source is used to store the BIOS configuration data (but not the BIOS firmware itself) and powers the Real Time Clock (RTC). The BIOS firmware is “hardcoded” in the motherboard itself and is not lost or deleted if a CMOS is removed, but the configuration data will be.

Wikipedia

A real-time clock (RTC) is an electronic device (most often in the form of an integrated circuit) that measures the passage of time. Although the term often refers to the devices in personal computers, servers and embedded systems, RTCs are present in almost any electronic device which needs to keep accurate time of day.

Answer Description

RJ-45 is the common name for the 8-pin connector (8P8C) used for various Ethernet cables (CAT5, CAT5e, CAT6, etc), which come with twisted pairs for cross-talk (interference) resistance.

Wikipedia

Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 1983 as IEEE 802.3. Ethernet has since been refined to support higher bit rates, a greater number of nodes, and longer link distances, but retains much backward compatibility. Over time, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies such as Token Ring, FDDI and ARCNET. The original 10BASE5 Ethernet uses a thick coaxial cable as a shared medium. This was largely superseded by 10BASE2, which used a thinner and more flexible cable that was both cheaper and easier to use. More modern Ethernet variants use twisted pair and fiber optic links in conjunction with switches. Over the course of its history, Ethernet data transfer rates have been increased from the original 2.94 Mbit/s to the latest 400 Gbit/s, with rates up to 1.6 Tbit/s under development. The Ethernet standards include several wiring and signaling variants of the OSI physical layer. Systems communicating over Ethernet divide a stream of data into shorter pieces called frames. Each frame contains source and destination addresses, and error-checking data so that damaged frames can be detected and discarded; most often, higher-layer protocols trigger retransmission of lost frames. Per the OSI model, Ethernet provides services up to and including the data link layer. The 48-bit MAC address was adopted by other IEEE 802 networking standards, including IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi), as well as by FDDI.

Answer Description

USB, VGA and yes, even SATA are all hot swap able. You should never hot swap a device that is internal to your PC, but if kept externally a SATA device can be hot swapped with a supported driver. A PATA device should never be hot swapped.

Answer Description

Redundant array of independent disks (RAID) storage uses multiple disks to provide fault tolerance and/or to increase storage capacity in a system.

RAID configurations are common when utilizing NAS systems

Wikipedia

RAID (; "redundant array of inexpensive disks" or "redundant array of independent disks") is a data storage virtualization technology that combines multiple physical disk drive components into one or more logical units for the purposes of data redundancy, performance improvement, or both. This is in contrast to the previous concept of highly reliable mainframe disk drives referred to as "single large expensive disk" (SLED).Data is distributed across the drives in one of several ways, referred to as RAID levels, depending on the required level of redundancy and performance. The different schemes, or data distribution layouts, are named by the word "RAID" followed by a number, for example RAID 0 or RAID 1. Each scheme, or RAID level, provides a different balance among the key goals: reliability, availability, performance, and capacity. RAID levels greater than RAID 0 provide protection against unrecoverable sector read errors, as well as against failures of whole physical drives.

Answer Description

While there is a variety of connectors for PCs, the pin (male) and socket (female) design of the Molex design has become recognized and very common for simplicity, reliability, and low cost.

Wikipedia

Molex connector is the vernacular term for a two-piece pin and socket interconnection. Pioneered by Molex Connector Company, the two-piece design became an early electronic standard. Molex developed and patented the first examples of this connector style in the late 1950s and early 1960s. First used in home appliances, other industries soon began designing it into their products from automobiles to vending machines to minicomputers. In such a connector, cylindrical spring-metal pins fit into cylindrical spring-metal sockets. The pins and sockets are held in a rectangular matrix in a nylon shell. The connector typically has 2 to 24 contacts and is polarized or keyed to ensure correct orientation. Pins and sockets can be arranged in any combination in a single housing, and each housing can be either male or female. There are three typical pin sizes: 1.57 mm (0.062 in), 2.13 mm (0.084 in), and 2.36 mm (0.093 in). The 1.57 mm pin can carry 5 A of current, while the 2.36 mm can carry 8.5 A. Because the pins have a large contact surface area and fit tightly, these connectors are typically used for power. In October 1963, AMP (now TE Connectivity) introduced the Mate-n-Lok connector. The AMP connector was similar to the patented Molex connectors but not interchangeable. Both were widely used in the computer industry and the term "Molex connector" is often inaccurately used to refer to all nylon plugs and receptacles. The first 5.25-inch floppy disk drive, the Shugart SA400, introduced in August 1976, used the AMP Mate-n-Lok connector part number 350211-1. This connector became the standard for 5.25-inch format

Answer Description

Hot swapping or hot plugging refers to a component that can be removed or added to a system while it is "hot" (powered on). A common example is a USB device.

Wikipedia

Hot swapping is the replacement or addition of components to a computer system without stopping, shutting down, or rebooting the system; hot plugging describes the addition of components only. Components which have such functionality are said to be hot-swappable or hot-pluggable; likewise, components which do not are cold-swappable or cold-pluggable. Most desktop computer hardware, such as CPUs and memory, are only cold-pluggable. However, it is common for mid to high-end servers and mainframes to feature hot-swappable capability for hardware components, such as CPU, memory, PCIe, SATA and SAS drives. An example of hot swapping is the express ability to pull a Universal Serial Bus (USB) peripheral device, such as a thumb drive, external hard disk drive (HDD), mouse, keyboard, or printer out of a computer's USB slot or peripheral hub without ejecting it first. Most smartphones and tablets with tray-loading holders can interchange SIM cards without powering down the system. Dedicated digital cameras and camcorders usually have readily accessible memory card and battery compartments for quick changing with only minimal interruption of operation. Batteries can be cycled through by recharging reserve batteries externally while unused. Many cameras and camcorders feature an internal memory to allow capturing when no memory card is inserted.

Answer Description

A Network Interface Card/Controller (NIC) provides the physical connection between the computer's expansion bus and the network cabling.

Wikipedia

A network interface controller (NIC, also known as a network interface card, network adapter, LAN adapter or physical network interface, and by similar terms) is a computer hardware component that connects a computer to a computer network.Early network interface controllers were commonly implemented on expansion cards that plugged into a computer bus. The low cost and ubiquity of the Ethernet standard means that most newer computers have a network interface built into the motherboard, or is contained into a USB-connected dongle. Modern network interface controllers offer advanced features such as interrupt and DMA interfaces to the host processors, support for multiple receive and transmit queues, partitioning into multiple logical interfaces, and on-controller network traffic processing such as the TCP offload engine.

Answer Description

Socket AM3 is a 941 pin processor socket designed for AMD processors. Socket AM3 supports DDR3 memory which is it's main advantage over AM2 and AM2+.

Wikipedia

Socket AM3 is a CPU socket for AMD processors. AM3 was launched on February 9, 2009 as the successor to Socket AM2+, alongside the initial grouping of Phenom II processors designed for it. The sole principal change from AM2+ to AM3 is support for DDR3 SDRAM. The fastest CPU for socket AM3 is the Phenom II X6 1100T. Like the previous AMD socket, the "AM3 Processor Functional Data Sheet" (AMD document number 40778) has not been made publicly available. The "Family 10h AMD Phenom™ Processor Product Data Sheet" (document 446878) has, but contains only a brief list of features of the Phenom, and does not contain any substantive technical data regarding socket AM3.

Answer Description

The DVI-D connector type only supports digital transmissions. DVI-I type is capable of transmitting both digital and analog.

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

A parity bit or parity check is used by some types of RAM and RAID configurations to verify if data has been corrupted.

Wikipedia

A parity bit, or check bit, is a bit added to a string of binary code. Parity bits are a simple form of error detecting code. Parity bits are generally applied to the smallest units of a communication protocol, typically 8-bit octets (bytes), although they can also be applied separately to an entire message string of bits. The parity bit ensures that the total number of 1-bits in the string is even or odd. Accordingly, there are two variants of parity bits: even parity bit and odd parity bit. In the case of even parity, for a given set of bits, the bits whose value is 1 are counted. If that count is odd, the parity bit value is set to 1, making the total count of occurrences of 1s in the whole set (including the parity bit) an even number. If the count of 1s in a given set of bits is already even, the parity bit's value is 0. In the case of odd parity, the coding is reversed. For a given set of bits, if the count of bits with a value of 1 is even, the parity bit value is set to 1 making the total count of 1s in the whole set (including the parity bit) an odd number. If the count of bits with a value of 1 is odd, the count is already odd so the parity bit's value is 0. Even parity is a special case of a cyclic redundancy check (CRC), where

Answer Description

Error Correcting Ram (ECC) is capable of detecting and correcting errors in memory (RAM). It does use parity but does not alert a user if an error is found. It is also common in servers but this is because of it's error correcting capabilities and not due to increased speed or clock rate.

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

Many mobile devices like smart phones and tablets use eMMC (embedded Multi Media Card) as an internal storage mechanism. eSata is not commonly found in these devices and is a not a storage medium but a bus interface for transmitting data. SDHC and Micro-SD are memory cards and not internal components.

Wikipedia

The MultiMediaCard, officially abbreviated as MMC, is a memory card standard used for solid-state storage Unveiled in 1997 by SanDisk and Siemens AG, MMC is based on a surface-contact low pin-count serial interface using a single memory stack substrate assembly, and is therefore much smaller than earlier systems based on high pin-count parallel interfaces using traditional surface-mount assembly such as CompactFlash Both products were initially introduced using SanDisk NOR-based flash technology MMC is about the size of a postage stamp: 24 mm × 32 mm × 14 mm MMC originally used a 1-bit serial interface, but newer versions of the specification allow transfers of 4 or 8 bits at a time

Answer Description

Most computers only have one moving/mechanical part - the hard disk drive. A clicking noise is a common indicator of a failing drive. The slowness is likely caused by disk read errors, leaving the logical answer to be the HDD. It is not likely to be a SSD issue because solid state drives do not have moving parts and would not make a clicking noise.

Wikipedia

Click of death is a term that had become common in the late 1990s referring to the clicking sound in disk storage systems that signals a disk drive has failed, often catastrophically.The clicking sound itself arises from the unexpected movement of the disk's read/write actuator. At startup, and during use, the disk head must move correctly and be able to confirm that it is correctly tracking data on the disk. If the head fails to move as expected or upon moving cannot track the disk surface correctly, the disk controller may attempt to recover from the error by returning the head to its home position and then retrying, at times causing an audible "click". In some devices, the process automatically retries, causing a repeated or rhythmic clicking sound, sometimes accompanied by the whirring sound of the drive plate spinning.

Answer Description

This is false. Serial ATA (Sata) cables only support one device per cable. PATA cables do support multiple devices using a single cable.

Wikipedia

Serial ATA (SATA, abbreviated from Serial AT Attachment) is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. Serial ATA succeeded the earlier Parallel ATA (PATA) standard to become the predominant interface for storage devices. Serial ATA industry compatibility specifications originate from the Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) which are then promulgated by the INCITS Technical Committee T13, AT Attachment (INCITS T13).

Answer Description

Resetting the CMOS battery will clear any saved BIOS configurations and the computer will instead use the factory default. BIOS settings are not managed in Windows and re-seating the HDD jumper will not affect the BIOS config.

Wikipedia

Nonvolatile BIOS memory refers to a small memory on PC motherboards that is used to store BIOS settings. It is traditionally called CMOS RAM because it uses a volatile, low-power complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) SRAM (such as the Motorola MC146818 or similar) powered by a small "CMOS" battery when system and standby power is off. It is referred to as non-volatile memory or NVRAM because, after the system loses power, it does retain state by virtue of the CMOS battery. The typical NVRAM capacity is 256 bytes.The CMOS RAM and the real-time clock have been integrated as a part of the southbridge chipset and it may not be a standalone chip on modern motherboards. In turn, the southbridge have been integrated into a single Platform Controller Hub. Today's UEFI motherboards use NVRAM to store configuration data (NVRAM is a part of the UEFI flash ROM), but by many OEMs' design, the UEFI settings are still lost if the CMOS battery fails.