I suspect the way most people look at their computers is the way I look at my car: confused and silently hoping that each day it will just work without any problems. The technology that goes into computers has progressed at a breakneck pace that until recently has only showed signs of slowing down; that said, the "slowdown" is roughly equivalent from reducing your speed from about 125 miles per hour to about ... we'll say 105.
Mercifully, if anything stays the same, it's the way computers are built. If you pop open the case on a desktop computer, there's an amalgam of wires, circuit boards, fans, and all kinds of crazy stuff that will likely just confuse people. But the logic and design that goes into this labyrinth of technology has actually gone relatively unchanged over the past decade. Of course, your laptop, on the other hand, won't do you the luxury of having all these interchangeable parts. In many ways a laptop can actually be MORE complex than a desktop.
Case in point: if my video card in my desktop goes on the fritz and decides it doesn't want to draw pretty pictures anymore, I can just pull it out and replace it with a new one. Not only that, but I have a wide variety (probably too wide) of cards I can put in a desktop, from $20 to even as far as $2,000 for workstation-class hardware. How did I know the video card itself went bad? I plugged my monitor into another computer and it worked just fine.
But what if your laptop stops giving a picture? It could be the cable that connects to the screen inside the shell. It could be the logic in the screen itself. It could be the graphics processor, the processor normally mounted to a removable video card in a desktop but soldered into place inside the laptop.
This long introduction boils down to a single point: laptops are complex. Even for the seasoned technology enthusiast they can be tricky; for the neophyte and the average user, they can be downright mind boggling. And that's where this guide comes in.
How It Works: Prologue
Over the next several weeks, I'm going to break down a single part of your laptop and explain what it does. This isn't going to be about recommendations, this is going to be about knowledge and understanding, dispensing information in such a way that eventually, you won't even need recommendations. You won't need someone to tell you "get this, this is good." You'll be able to know what you need and why.
This week I'll be covering the basic information you'll need to understand the stuff I'm talking about. Don't worry, it's not a huge deal, and there isn't going to be a test later.
There's one very important term and two units of measure that are vital to explaining any of these things to you.
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