Geek Spot 2 by Jeff Timm

Hi! I’m Jeff Timm, personal computer user since 1983. My wife Holly insisted I share my knowledge and answer your basic computer hardware questions.

What’s in a personal computer?

The "computer" is actually the CPU. (Central Processing Unit) This is a circuit chip just full of little tiny transistors counting on their fingers. They are so small they have only one finger each. The result is the Digital computer, full of millions of switches that are either on or off, one (1) or zero (0), no matter which CPU you have, Pentium, Celeron, G3, G4, or 8086. They are still counting on one finger, they just use a LOT of fingers moving very fast to make all those wonderful programs work…usually.

When it is turned off a CPU knows nothing. When you turn it on, it has to be told what to do all over again.

1. You push the switch, and power flows to the motherboard.
2. The motherboard distributes power to the chips and circuits mounted on it.
3. The CPU draws power.
4. The BIOS (Basic Input Output System) another chip filled with instructions that don’t change when the power is off, tells the CPU where to look for the parts of the motherboard.
5. The hard disk has spun up to operating speed and the CPU gets its first instructions.
6. The next thing loaded is the Operating System, which tells the CPU what to do with all the parts it has discovered. In the case of Windows ™ the Operating System examines the whole computer for new hardware. This seems wasteful when you almost never add to your system, but with Windows 95 and 98 and late versions of NT the Operating System actually tries to improve it’s performance by gently rewriting itself to be better than it was the last time you started it. At least that’s the theory.

This goes a long way toward explaining why computers usually fail when they start. It also explains why Windows programs from Microsoft can suddenly start having problems and why the first thing you try to fix it, is to restart the machine, and see what happens.