May 20, 1994
Dear Everyone:
I spent two days this week in a class called "Inside Your PC".
Guess what it's about.
This is an important class
because it's the prerequisite for a lot of the more "advanced" courses
such as How to Run a Local Area Network (LAN), of which I now have
three. It's also very useful.
Now I know why our two Dells are
so-o-o slow.
They just don't have the
Megahertz to move any faster.
After two days in class, I know how they feel.
We began with the usual, who are you and what you hope to get out of
this course (besides the handy toolkit); some basic send a brief history
of PCs from the early 1980s to the present.
Then it was time to rip the
covers off our practice PCs and dive in.
But first, a few words about electricity.
You should always disconnect the power cord so you don't
electrocute yourself. But there
is another consideration. You can
also electrocute the PC without meaning to.
This is because they are
extremely susceptible to static charges.
To safeguard against this, you should always remove all your
clothes before climbing inside a PC.
Or where a grounding wire. They
made sure we each had a grounding wire. Otherwise,
although the class would have been rather lively, if somewhat chilly, we
might not have learned all that much about PCs.
For this class, we had some old
286s to take
apart; and, for good measure, all but one of the access screws had
already been removed. Without
that, we might have spent half the day just figuring out how to get the
cover off. (Helpful hint:
If the keyboard is connected at
the front of your PC,
disconnect it before you accidentally rip it loose.)
Now for the guts. Remember high
school biology, when you had to dissect a frog (or a rat), and the
innards never looked anything
like the sketches in the book? Same
principle here. No two PCs look
exactly the same inside, even if they're the same make and model.
This is because PCs are
modular, meaning you can fit
different pieces together into whatever combination you want.
You've got your drives (A, B, C and, in some cases, room for D).
You've got your mother board (if
you don't have a mother board, you have a big paperweight, but not a
PC). You've got your
microprocessor
(looks like a large gray postage stamp).
And you've got your
expansion cards
(E-Cards).
E-Cards are what make your PC do more than just sit and whirr at you.
Want a monitor, so you can see
what you're doing? Gotta have an
E-Card for the monitor. Got a
mouse? Better have a mouse Card.
And so on…
We got to take drives out and put them back in again.
We took E-Cards out and put them
in differently. We learned where
to stuff in extra memory and how to convince the PC that the memory is
there and how to use it.
All the while, the two instructors kept reminding us that we weren't
expected to come out of the class as PC repairpersons.
We were just learning enough to
fix extremely simple problems and talk intelligently to the
real repair people.
So, when someone tells me that they want a mouse for their PC, I'll know
enough to check first and see if they already have the necessary E-Card
in place. There is nothing like
ordering a part and then discovering that you don't have anything to
plug it into.
A few weeks ago, I called report a problem with a PC.
When the repair person asked a
technical question, I had no idea
what he meant.
Then he asked, "Who's your PC Coordinator?"
Reply: "I am."
(I could hear him wincing.)
Now, when I called report a problem, I can say things like, "It looks
like the VGA Card has
gone down", instead of, "It's making this funny noise".
I'm sure we'll all be happier this way.
Love, as always,
Pete
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