Motherboards hold all the pieces that make up your computer. It supplies all the wiring and connections needed to make your computer run. However, you may feel that need to upgrade or replace your motherboard. Before anything can be done, you need to be absolutely sure that you have to upgrade your motherboard. As a stand-alone part, motherboards are probably the part that would least likely need an upgrade. Some reasons for having to upgrade would be: Not enough space for an adequate amount of RAM No slot for an Read More

The need may arise to use a nonstandard connection with a device. Such a need can occur when a Firewire connectible device is used in a USB connector or vice versa. An adapter is the most useful option for those who need to connect a Firewire device to a USB port or a USB device into a Firewire port. Hub Devices Hub devices are designed to add additional ports to the computer via a USB interface. The hub hardware can connect the Firewire device and the computer when it is Read More

With each day that passes, we rely more and more on computers for all facets of our lives in the information age. Every aspect of daily life from financial matters, health issues, and leisure time all have ties to the World Wide Web and, ultimately, computers now. For some, their computer is their livelihood. For even more, their computer provides them a crucial resource for information, communication, and organization. One reason that computers are able to accomplish all of these remarkable feats that shape our lives is their ability to Read More

DVD Mastering is a digital optimization procedure that eventually readies a DVD project for duplication or reproduction. DV mastering is done for both audio and audiovisual projects, and with the right knowledge and software, can be done by just about anyone. DVD mastering procedures generally vary with the type of services sought and the form of source materials provided. For audio, the customer usually submits the DVD mastering service with a mix down of the finished product in two-channel digital and analog tracks. The mastering service in turn runs these Read More

USB (Universal Serial Bus) is a hardware specification that allows a connection to be established between a source device and a peripheral device. Most modern electronic devices include at least one built-in USB port and can use USB technology to connect to other devices, such as keyboards, mice, cameras, flash drives, external hard drives, printers, media players, wireless network adapters, game consoles, and cell phones. USB technology allows devices to share data and is widely used to transfer files to an external storage device. Additionally, USB technology can supply power Read More

LBA is Logical Block Addressing. Early PC hard drives were supported by the PC BIOS using Cylinder/Head/Sector addressing. To read or write from a specific sector on the disk, you specified the sector in terms of its cylinder number, its head number, and its sector number. LBA adressing uses just one number. In LBA addressing, the first sector on the disk is sector zero and all sectors on the disk are simply incremented from there.

DMA stands for Direct Memory Access, a capability in modern computers that allows peripheral devices to send data to the motherboard’s memory without intervention from the CPU. The DMA controllers are special hardware – now embedded into the chip in modern integrated processors – that manage the data transfers and arbitrate access to the system bus. The controllers are programmed with source and destination pointers (where to read/write the data), counters to track the number of transferred bytes, and settings, which includes I/O and memory types, interrupts and states for Read More

A microchip, commonly called the integrated circuit, is a tiny electronic circuit. It is made up primarily of semiconductor devices. For the most part, these small microchips are used in nearly every type of electronic device known to man. As the years have gone on from their creation in the late 50s and early 60s, the microchip has become much smaller and more inexpensive to make. Because of this, it has allowed more users to gain access to greater types of electronics. The History of the Microchip In 1968, Jack Read More

Fingerprint scanners are biometric security systems designed to use the distinct features of an individual's fingerprints to provide security. Fingerprint scanners are now being used in police stations, security-intensive industries and, most recently, on computer shops as a peripheral device for computers. Biology of a Fingerprint Every person has marks on his fingers. These marks on the fingers are mainly for gripping things as they provide frictional resistance. These marks have a pattern and this pattern is called the fingerprint. The person's fingerprint is determined by his or her genetic Read More

The motherboard is the most essential component in a personal computer. It is the piece of hardware that contains the computer’s micro-processing chip and everything attached to it is vital to making the computer run. The term “mainboard” is also sometimes used to refer to the motherboard . Motherboard Components The motherboard is the flat, rectangular piece of circuit board inside the computer’s case to which everything seems to connect to for one reason or another. It contains the following key components: A microprocessor “socket” that defines what kind of Read More