mortiz019

What is a CD Rom? CD is short for compact disc! Unlike the Floppy disk or the hard drive that are magnetic storage CD Roms are optic storage. They are read by a very fine laser beam. My children love to think of Star Wars when I say that! Floppy disk's lifespan can be very short, and to be honest can be very fragile! Keep in mind some floppy disks are better than others, but overall its scarey to depend on them. Magnetics can wear out quickly where as the CD rom? Its can take a licking and keep on ticking as the commerical says! Please don't take that to mean you need to abuse them. You don't want to do that either! CD Roms can wear out as well, but most of the time if you take care of them its measured in spans of 10 years or more! Besides the durable nature of the CD rom lets look at storage space compared to Floppy disk. You can place an entire encylopedia on a CD rom. If you were to place that on Floppy disks? It would be more than 400 disks to have the sam...

In previous lessons I was trying to explain the different types of disk drives. The last type of disk drive is called the CD Drive that you place CD Roms in. Let me show you a picture of the drive with a CD Rom in it. For my computer the E drive is my CD rom drive. How did I figure that out? You can either go to 'my computer' on your desktop, OR Vista has renamed "My computer" to just 'Computer'. Most of the time Windows Vista and XP don't have their version of 'my computer' on the desktop. If you have it on your desktop it could look similar to this: If you see 'my computer' or 'computer' like pictured above on your desktop double click it at this point. If you don't have one of those icons above (or similar) Hit your start button , and then go to computer (newer systems like Vista) or 'my computer' for other versions of windows. You should see a bunch of disk drives with letters. We are only concerned with those at th...

What is an Operating System? The operating system of your computer is the is the MOST important program, and basically the backbone of your computer. We deal with Windows PC's on this blog, and your operating system can be called: Windows Vista Windows XP Windows 2000 Windows ME Windows 98 Windows 95 Those are some of the names that seem to be the most popular for operating systems software for your computer. If you are reading about operating systems you may see people call them OS or O/S. Those are short abreviations for the word 'operating system'. The purpose of an operating system is to organize and control hardware and software so that the device it lives in behaves in a flexible but predictable way. Believe it or not operating systems have started to pop up in smaller computers as well. If you tinker with electronic devices, you're probably thrilled to know that operating systems can now be found on many of the devices we use every day, from cell phones to v...