Computer Terms 101

It's like learning a foreign language, what are all those new words your computer savy friends are saying: "hey, I just upgraded my RAM, got a big HD, with 350 GB's of space, and new wifi card , oh and I just noticed that the FSB on my MB, is great, I am going to check my Bios and Registry later today".

Ok, the Basics:

Right Click / Left Click when do you do one or the other, and when do you single click or double click, oh boy.

Left Click = an action, you left click when you want to perform a function or take action, its a verb, a way to take your computer to war.

Right Click = a proposition, you are asking the computer to show you what your options are, can I save, copy, paste, delete, kill, etc.

You double click when you are Left clicking on a program and you want it to open, you single Left Click inside the program when you want to open something inside a program, so you pull the file out of the cabinet by unlocking and opening it (double click), then you pull the contents out of the file you want to read (single click).

Right click is always a single click on your mouse.

Ok, now that we have muddled our way through that, what about all those Abbreviations?

GB = GigaByte and is 2 to the 30th power, or 1,073,741,824 bytes.

It can be estimated as 10 to the 9th power, or one billion (1,000,000,000) bytes. A gigabyte is 1,024 megabytes (MB) and precedes the terabyte (TB) unit of measurement. Hard drive sizes are typically measured in gigabytes, such as a 160GB or 250GB drive. The term gigabyte is often often abbreviated as simply a "gig" in speech. For example, if you have a 250GB hard drive, you could say, "I have 250 gigs of disk space." The prefix "giga" comes from the Greek word "gigas," meaning giant.

So that did not help? OK, in order you have a Byte, then a MegaByte, then GigaByte, and last the TeraByte. A terabyte is huge.

RAM = Random Access Memory. RAM is made up of small memory chips that form a memory module. These modules are installed in the RAM slots on the motherboard of your computer.

Every time you open a program, it gets loaded from the hard drive into the RAM. This is because reading data from the RAM is much faster than reading data from the hard drive. Running programs from the RAM of the computer allows them to function without any lag time. The more RAM your computer has, the more data can be loaded from the hard drive into the RAM, which can effectively speed up your computer. In fact, adding RAM can be more beneficial to your computer's performance than upgrading the CPU.

To check how much RAM a Windows computer has, open the "System" Control Panel. This can be done by right-clicking "My Computer" and selecting "Properties..." To view how much RAM is installed in a Macintosh computer, select "About This Mac" from the Apple Menu.

Virus ~ A computer virus is not much different than a biological virus like the flu, a computer virus is something you don't want to get, and something you want to inoculate for. Computer viruses are small programs or scripts that can negatively affect the health of your computer. These malicious little programs can create files, move files, erase files, consume your computer's memory, and cause your computer not to function correctly. Some viruses can duplicate themselves, attach themselves to programs, and travel across networks. In fact opening an infected e-mail attachment is the most common way to get a virus.

So how do we inoculate our computer we use an anti-virus program or software.

Anti - Virus ~ is a software program used to identify and remove those nasty virus's we just talked about, most of the more newer programs come complete with an anti-spyware program as well. An anti-virus software program is one program that I firmly believe in spending the money on, and one of 3 programs you really must have on your computer if you plan to spend any time online or using the internet.