what he said ^^^ thought I'd add this
http://www.jegsworks.com/Lessons/lesson10/lesson10-4noframe.htm
http://mikescomputerinfo.com/images/7ixeh1.jpg (this is a bit older, doesn't include SATA etc...)
I wrote this for a mate a few years ago - touched it up slightly just now. I couldn't be bothered fixing his computer again so I explained it in idiot speak and let him get on with building a new one:
The big board that everything's plugged into is the motherboard. Every piece of harware you connect to a computer communicates through this board.
The processor or cpu is a small square chip which is about 2¨x 2¨. It's obvious due to the big heat sink and/or fan attached to the top of it. It does all the 'thinking' if you're talking in idiot speak. The latest cpu's have 4 'cores' - kind of like 4 cpu's in one chip, although it doesn't quite work like that.
The Hard Disk is where everything you have on your computer is stored. Your average drive spins at 7200rpm, although some laptop drives spin at 5200rpm, and some top of the line drives spin at 10,000 or even 15,000 rpm. Your average drive holds around 200Gb or 200,000Mb these days, this is around 200,000 minutes of mp3's, so around 50,000 mp3 tracks if that's easier to grasp. Hard disks access the information on them reletively slowly.
The Memory or RAM (random access memory, it’s all the same thing) is, in my mind, where information from the hard disk travels to before being accessed by the cpu etc... Unlike the hard drives it is very fast, but it's far more expensive (£/$ to gb). Most computers only have 1gb of ram.
The video card or graphics card is often a seperate card plugged into the motherboard. It has it's own processors that perform the graphics orientated operations. Many cheap computers have an 'on board' graphics card - this refers to there being no seperate video card, and there is a graphics card on the motherboard. These are usually lacking in the power needed to play games etc.., but are fine for day to day use.
The video card information applies to sound cards as well.
http://www.ngohq.com/attachments/ne...launches-am2-motherboard-k9a2-platinum-2d.jpg
This whole thing is a motherboard.
If you look at this image, the white square is where the cpu plugs in.
The green orange green orange slots below are for RAM/memory
The 6 (4 blueie/purple and 2 red) slots to the left of these are SATA (serial ATA) slots. Modern hard drives use this to connect to the motherboard. Previously we used PATA (parallel ATA). This was slower and you could connect a maximum of 4 drives. CD/DVD drives still use this standard. There is one PATA socket on this board – the white rectangle below the RAM slots.
The other blue and white vertical slots are pci/pci express slots. These are used for video and sound cards etc…
Don’t call me, it’s easy – and you still owe me a 24 pack of miller (or your g/f does ;-) )
